This is a really strong book… in the acknowledgments, the author writes about the Ellie character living in fear and… I wonder if the reason I don't rate it higher is because she did it so well that Ellie could be a rather uncomfortable mirror of who I am or who I was or some weird combination of the two. (Thank goodness I have my beloved, so I don't have to face it alone, like I did when I was younger.)

Sure, some of the premise was unrealistic but… one doesn't go to holiday romances for their realism, do we? And the ending was powerful… my love/hate relationship with the romance genre comes from narrative structure, where authors put characters through hells before they get to their happily ever afters… and I usually want to read happiness more than hells… (and I don't know yet what it takes for a book to keep reminding me of the happiness while it drags its characters through the struggles to get there; but I know some manage to do it better than others)

Still worth the read, even though I took it in smaller chunks than I prefer to, because sometimes the feelings became too much to continue reading without putting the book down for a few hours.