This may have been a case of "the cover made me do it". I'm a sucker for beautiful winter/holiday book covers!
 Christmas is tough for Josie, the main character of Always, In December. 
 She lost her parents in a car accident on Christmas Day and has a secret tradition to write a letter to them every year since.
 En route to mail her letter, she falls in the street and meets Max. Sparks are immediate, despite recent breakups on either side.
 The description of this one said its's an emotional and romantic read. And it does get there! Much of it fell flat for me until the end, unfortunately. Perhaps a pacing issue.
 It happens! Onto the next!

This book is horribly ableist, and has a nasty undercurrent of fat phobia. The take home message seems to be that sick people serve no other purpose than to inspire healthy people to live better lives. The writing is quite honestly terrible. How nobody on the editorial team thought to flag the fact that the term “so and so huffed out a breath”, is beyond me. I am not exaggerating when I say that the phrase must appear over 100 times in a 400 page book. 

I was hoping this book would be a meaningful look at grief, and holiday related grief in particular, but even that aspect was shallow and poorly developed. If you’re hoping for a less traditional Christmas read, skip this one. It’s not worth the terrible writing and the even worse content. 

Not a romance and frankly I’m pissed off because this was shelved with romance and I picked it up believing it would be a romance. There’s no HEA. Max fucking DIES at the end.

I had several other problems with this:
- tropey in a way that had characters behaving as if they were puppets. There’s a difference between tropey stuff happening and characters behaving counter to how they actually would just to make the trips happen.
- Straight with a capital S. Not because of a lack of queer characters (the one gay guy in the book was a minor character with barely any lines except to make it obvious he was gay) but because of how heteronormatively focused it was on how “the other girl” was prettier/had longer legs/whatever than herself because his forbid men like them for their personalities, or something 
- fatphobia. There is one singular fat character in this book and he existed only to be gross and disgusting because of his size. His ‘inappropriate’ behaviour was also emphasised through his fatness - frankly, if he’d been thin his behaviour wouldn’t have been anything much to comment on but no, let’s just make the fat person disgusting for no reason.

Besides all of that I thought it kind of ok. I guess people who enjoy having their hearts torn out and tramped on with no satisfying healing to follow up with would enjoy this. I don’t. I can’t in good conscience recommend it to anybody - the fatphobia alone made sure I would never recommend this book to anyone - but also I’m just too bloody mad. I could tell something was going on with Max and I was wondering what secret/burden it was going to be - had he had a mental health breakdown? Had he been assaulted? Had he lost an unborn child? Had he been sexually assaulted? I did not expect “inoperable brain tumour” or him just dying out of the blue. And maybe I should’ve picked up on it but I haven’t read this type of novel in so long that I must’ve forgotten what the conventions are like, and did I say, this was shelved as fucking romance so I expected it to be a fucking romance.

I’m going to bed.

the twist was super heartbreaking but also felt like it came out of nowhere??? if it didn’t happen like that it prob wouldn’t have packed the emotional punch it did but omg…just heartbreaking but such a good story ❤️