Synopsis:
It’s two days ‘til Christmas … and she’s on the run.
Holly Driver despises Christmas. She prefers to spend the holidays alone without tinsel or turkey, thank you very much. However, this year, she can’t avoid her client’s Christmas party.
But when a drinking game gets out of hand, Holly wakes to a viral TikTok of her antics and she can’t remember a thing. Mortified, she escapes the city and bumps into Bailey, the chef she met at the party, who’s full of festive cheer.
With her train cancelled, Holly reluctantly agrees to spend the night at his family home – only to discover it’s Christmas on steroids. Even worse, everyone assumes she’s Bailey’s girlfriend and he doesn’t correct them.
What’s he playing at? Is he deliberately trying to annoy her or is there a deeper intention behind his fake dating ruse?
Review:
I finished The Holly Project a couple of weeks ago now and have been putting off writing its review as I’m really not sure what to say. I’m a big fan of fake dating books so I knew I’d like this to some extent but the whole thing felt very surface level. You don’t really get to know the characters, our fake dating characters know nothing about each other so that element wasn’t too exciting.
Holly’s feelings towards Bailey almost gave me whiplash. The hate she felt towards him after seeing him for literal seconds was way over the top and then the sudden change to finding him attractive was fast. The romance, from both characters, came from nowhere. I think if you spent more time with Bailey before the fake dating bit came into it, it would have been better, but you didn’t know anything about him other than Holly hates him and he loves Christmas.
The best part of The Holly Project was Bailey’s family Christmas. I love it when these types of books remind me of my childhood Christmases. Mine were never over the top like this one but having the whole family together for the one day are some of my favourite childhood memories. We definitely never watched Tik Tok on the TV though, please tell me people don’t actually do this.
The parts of this book that were festive were really nice. It’s unusual for me to actually read a Christmas book in December so the festive feelings were definitely there. I loved the little activities the family would do on the lead up to Christmas, those really made this feel festive.
I really don’t have much else to say about The Holly Project. It’s one of those books where everything happens in such a short space of time that the pace feels a little all over the place. I’m all for falling in love at Christmas but not with someone you met four days ago. Still it’s pretty cute and I have given it a very generous rating of three stars. Which may seem a bit ridiculous based on this review, but there were parts I really liked, Crumpet the dog for example, but I don’t want to spoil too much of what happens.
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