A Wallflower Christmas

I really enjoyed this cute little addition to the Wallflower series. It was a perfect Christmas time read! It felt warm and cozy, like catching up with old friends or sipping hot chocolate in front of the fireplace.

Definitely not a deep, inspiring read by any means, but I adore the Wallflowers and Natalie, the newest addition, isn't bad herself!

I honestly didn't enjoy this one. It only gets 2 stars (instead of 0) because there were some great scenes with the Wallflowers.

Rafe was the very worst kind of alphahole. He is presumptuous, entitled... the worst kind of arrogant, rich, spoiled snob. I think the scene early on where he smashes the teacup (it's not a plot point, so I don't feel like it is a spoiler) is a good sum up of his personality. He will happily take a thing that isn't his, and break it to pieces to establish his dominance over it, with no consequences at all because he's a wealthy, important asshole.

This kicked off our first full encounter of Rafe and Hannah alone for any length of time (the earlier scene

where he stole a kiss as she left the tea party - while eye-rolling and arrogant, it wasn't super unusual for HR -

was like a 30 second encounter so it doesn't really count). And his behavior was reprehensible.

After opening with an attack on her for being jealous - which was bullshit, btw, because we've been in her POV and her concern has entirely been, up until then, about protecting her (bitchy, spoiled, utterly asinine) cousin Natalie - he then goes on to declare that he's going to make Hannah his mistress... and basically assaults her. Look. I know HR likes their heroes to be alpha, and I do too. But this felt way over the line. He was

incredibly nasty to her in that conversation, and then he forced himself on her.

I was deeply uncomfortable.

But I had faith in Kleypas. She's pretty skilled at redeeming alpha heroes who have their heads so far up their own asses that it is amazing they can breathe. In fact, the Wallflowers is utterly filled with that type. But I will say that none of other other heroes crossed the line like this (in the spoiler tag above). So I knew that, for me, it was going to be a hard sell. But I soldiered on.

And it didn't pay off. Because Hannah was one of those horrible heroines... the "no, no! no! ... yes, yes,

yes!" types. She never, not once, ACTUALLY pushes back against Rafe. She never holds him responsible for a single shitty thing he does. She never punches him in the junk (which he deserved at least twice) and walks away.

He does nothing, not one single thing, to earn her. And no, don't say that

refusing to marry Natalie earned Hannah.

That's bullshit. That was Rafe's own war with his father, and it did nothing to make up for the entitled, asshole way he'd treated Hannah throughout this book. He was disgusting. But, like all rich, spoiled mean, the world bent over backwards to give him everything he wanted.

*spit*

I love the Wallflowers. The book gets 5 stars for the touching scenes with them - they were like little extended epilogues. But it gets 0 stars for Rafe and Hannah. So I'm marking the rating as 2 stars.