A Merry Little Meet Cute by Julie Murphy
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
The holiday romcom that said “what if….. chaos, but make it festive?”
A porn star and a reformed bad-boy boyband singer walk into a Christmas-themed strip club…
No, really. You cannot make this stuff up.
Actually you can, because Julie Murphy did, and I devoured every gingerbread-scented (iykyk) page of it.
The book starts a little slow, but the slow burn?
EXCELLENT.
We’re talking simmering-under-the-Santa-hat chemistry that eventually erupts into spicy scenes and aching, aching longing. The kind that makes you clutch the book and whisper “oh we’re doing THIS now??” at 2 AM.
The characters are intensely themselves - big personalities, big feelings, big everything - the kind of people who crash into a plot and immediately take over the room. They’re messy and earnest and chaotic in a way that makes the story feel alive.
My big gripe
I am so here for people being treated with dignity and respect without the fine print of “only if your life looks a certain way.”
But the book falls into this repetitive cycle of
“I’m fat.”
“I’m a porn star.”
“I’m a fat porn star.”
to the point where it overshadows every other dimension she could have shown.
Her job and her body shouldn’t be the whole personality résumé, and I kept wishing the story trusted her to be more than those two labels.
But even with that frustration, the charm absolutely wins.
Nolan is a golden-retriever disaster boy with a crush so loud you can hear it jingling from space.
Bee is sunshine and chaos and fire, barreling her way through a Hallmark-coded production like a festive scandal magnet.
Together?
They’re mistletoe-level dangerous.
If you want a holiday romance that mixes cozy movie-set vibes, off-the-charts chemistry, and just enough of a spicy mess to keep things interesting... this is your candy-cane crack.
xoxo
