Book 881: The Best Gift – Eli Easton

When this one came in to my inbox I didn’t jump at it.* I was drawn to the veteran storyline and the  other protagonist having lost his son recently, but Easton isn’t an OMG must read even though I enjoyed her Clyde’s Corner series.

And I was more-or-less right. There wasn’t anything wrong with the story but I finished less than three days ago as I’m writing this and I’ve forgotten so much of it already. That’s not necessarily a bad thing when it comes to MM Romance novels, because they’re really for fun and enjoyment not deep thoughts and pondering, but three days seems a bit short even for that.

For me, I think the big problem was I knew almost immediately what the big reveal/crisis was going to be. That’s not always a bad thing because some of the time you pick a book BECAUSE of the crisis and just live for it. But for some reason this one annoyed me. I think it was Easton’s leaning heavily on the foreshadowing starting in Chapter 10 and just leaning more and more on it each chapter until finally it was like DUH.

I felt a pang of guilt. There were things I still hadn’t come clean to Greg about. I would. But not now. Not yet. Not when things were going so well. Not when Greg looked so much less broken than when I’d arrived. I couldn’t take that away from him yet. (Chapter 10)

But on to the parts I enjoyed. Easton did a great job writing the protagonists, Greg, still mourning the loss of his son and contemplating selling his family Christmas tree farm and store, and Robbie, a veteran suffering from PTSD who appears randomly near the farm that Greg offers a job to for the season and they fall for each other.

Easton did both a fade to curtains and an on the page sex scene and I almost wish she would’ve done one or the other for the whole book. When the second one happened I’d mentally prepared for a more clean/sweet romance and then all of a sudden, nope.

‘Hey. I didn’t want to say this in front of Roseanne, but the thing is, once Sam heard I was gay, which was, like, day two he was on our squad, he kept chatting me up about you.’
‘He did?’
‘Hell yeah. He talked about you all the time. He’d tell me how you were a total DILF, really good-looking and the greatest guy on earth, and how he thought we’d get along.’
Now Greg really did laugh. ‘Dang, that sounds like Sam. That kid was so determined to get me married.’ He blushed, as if mentioning marriage was too much. ‘Or whatever.’ (Chapter 18)

My favorite character was probably Sam, Greg’s son, who never really appeared in the book. He brought Greg and Robbie together and continued to give everyone gifts even though he’d been gone for a while. I think Easton really loves the “from the beyond” influence on her romances or maybe that during Christmas? Two of the three Christmas novels I’ve read by her have had that from the beyond as part of the story.

Recommendation: A decent read. There was nothing that offended me, but at the same time I was just sort of minimally engaged. The protagonists, Greg and Robbie, were believable and I enjoyed getting to know them, but the book fell flat overall for me and I can’t quite put my finger on why.

*I received a copy of The Best Gift via Gay Romance Reviews in return for my honest opinion. No goods or money were exchanged.

Opening Line: “Oh Come All Ye Faithful,the one with the glorious trumpets, was playing over the PA system when I looked around for the next customer.”

Closing Line: “With Robbie and Aaron, Cabot’s Christmas Wonderland had a future. And so did I.” (Whited out to avoid spoilers, highlight to read.)