Mary Balogh, A Christmas Bride / Christmas Beau

In A Christmas Bride, Edgar Downes (brother of Cora from The Famous Heroine) is seeking a wife, but instead of proposing to one of society’s eligible young debutantes, he’s attracted to the scandalous widow Lady Helena Stapleton. Helena is drawn to Edgar as well, but because of certain events in her past (described in A Precious Jewel), she’s full of self-loathing and believes herself unworthy of love. Can Edgar change her mind? Then, in Christmas Beau, Max, the Marquess of Denbigh, is pursuing revenge against Judith Easton, the woman who jilted him eight years ago. He plans to seduce her, then break her heart as she broke his. But as he woos her, he begins to have second thoughts about his scheme.

One thing I admire about Balogh is her willingness to write unusual or unlikable protagonists. Helena and Max both do some objectively terrible things, and while I didn’t fully buy into their redemption arcs (especially Helena’s), I did appreciate their moral complexity. Christmas Beau is the more enjoyable book, in my opinion – A Christmas Bride has too many callbacks to previous novels – but both are pretty good reads. Be warned, both books are also overflowing with sappy depictions of a picture-perfect English country Christmas, complete with adorable children and unreasonably kind and accepting secondary characters. But ’tis the season for that sort of thing, and if you have a high sugar tolerance, you’ll probably enjoy these novels.

Kristen Britain, The High King’s Tomb

After the events of First Rider’s Call, the magical wall that protects the kingdom of Sacoridia from the dark magic of Blackveil is beginning to crumble. To fix it, King Zachary needs an ancient book that will explain the magic necessary to repair the wall, so he sends Karigan along with a rookie Rider to find it. But the acolytes of the evil sorcerer Mornhavon the Black are also after the book, hoping to destroy the wall for good. This continuation of the Green Rider series is, like its predecessors, a solid “classic” fantasy novel. I found it a bit too sprawling—there are a lot of POV characters and at least four different plots going at any one time, and it takes a while for everything to come together. That said, I appreciate the continuity between books and the realism of these characters having lives and problems in addition to the main “defeat the evil sorcerer” plot. My library has the rest of this series, so I’ll most likely continue with it in the new year.