100 Books Like Snowflakes and Song Lyrics

The realistic queer characters facing the reality of a long-distance romance made me love this. It’s Country Mouse/City Mouse, with an argument over which place has the better Christmas, resulting in each spending time on the other's turf to decide. But unlike the usual Hallmark trope, no grinches exist here, quite the opposite.

Bex the doctor loves her life in the city, she's warm and welcoming, goes to the Nutcracker, and enjoys fine dining for the holidays. Similarly, Eva has friends, family, community, and major roots in Vermont—everything but love, really. Their careers and settled relationships matter, and permanent relocation is never really up for negotiation. If they're going to find a solution to their situation, it's going to involve compromise—and I loved that.

It’s a queer re-telling of The Gift of the Magi, both adorable and melodramatic—and I loved it! Yin and Ari celebrate their own space they’ve carved out with help from supportive friends and family and their own hard work, which fits Herrera’s Dreamers/refugee theme and is handled with trust, compassion, and love—but isn’t sugar-coated, either.

They’ve both got instincts and baggage around things falling apart or not working out and a hesitancy to think they can do enough for each other. This brilliantly written psychology leads to a series of good (yet terrible) choices. Watching them try to do something truly special for each other—even though they’re breaking their own rules for the gift exchange—had this wonderful bittersweet edge to it that ultimately ended on a note of joy I really loved, even if it got a little bumpy along the way.

I re-listen to this one on audiobook every year while I bake my Christmas cookies and walk the dog, and every year, it helps conjure joy via the two men realizing they’re right for each other despite some missteps. Thanks to some dire events, the main character, Toby, learns how to both stand up for himself and finally declare what it is he wants out of life—which happens to be Mr. Miggles, the town librarian (and also his boss).

Tristan Wright takes an already wonderful story and makes it entirely engrossing via his performance, and I have multiple “Yes!” fist-pumping moments throughout (which, if I’m walking the dog, makes people stare at me on the street). Also, Toby and his love interest, Mr. Miggles, are librarians, and this story has so much library love in it I felt like I was getting a warm hug.

Holiday Fauxmance—i.e., fake dating for the holidays—is a peppermint-scented novella catnip for me. Sasha’s family can be a bit much over her being single, which she knows comes from a good place but is relentless, so she makes up a girlfriend, which works until her eldest sister tries to call her bluff and dares her to bring her “girlfriend” home for the holidays.

Enter neighbor Kennedy, who is beautiful, available, and—bonus—she’s also an actress and in need of a gig. This book is sweet and cute and the couple drew me in from the start, and I can’t express how much I loved the low-angst content. Their connections came from genuine emotions coming out of the pretending and the scene where they eventually come clean about the deception. I could not stop laughing.

I learned about the existence of Don’t Stop Believing through Gwen Hayes’ writing craft book Romancing the Beat. She used it as her example outline. It was the first thing I read to pick out story beats, and I meant to focus on writing craft while reading, but I fell in love with the characters. Both leads are precious! It gets me in the holiday mood but I reread this one all year round. Snowed in at Christmastime when they both secretly like the other already? Gimme gimme gimme (this book after midnight). It’s just so festive and cute.

This one is technically New Year’s holidays, not Christmas specifically, but it swept me away with the meet cute and resulting fake dating. The main couple is adorable, and so is the side couple whose wedding they’re attending. Beau? Charms my pants off. The kisses (and more) steam up my glasses. I also appreciate the nonbinary representation; Alex is hilarious. It’s funny and cute and ugh, I just love it so much.

I opened this book and immediately felt comfortable with the narrative style: dual POV, third person, with a hint of humor right on the first page. It’s a cute little Christmassy novella. One character is a lesfic author and the other is a huge fan of hers (but doesn’t know it’s her) – I enjoyed the “mystery” of Ivy trying to piece together Kit’s pen name. Kit’s young niece was also very cute. Overall, this story just felt like a safe space. I was able to curl up and know that everything was going to be okay.

I’ve never read a book quite like this, and yet it felt hauntingly familiar. The population of Earth is rescued en masse from a destructive solar event and has to start again from scratch on an unknown planet. But of course humanity has taken the problems of its own nature with it, and the encounter with its new hosts only raises further questions – around sex, gender, love, and nature. It’s brave and beautiful, hopeful and sad and dynamic all at once, and it kept me reading and guessing all the way to the end. 

Many books have kissing in the forest, but how many are about kissing the forest itself?

Fenton has watched countless hunters enter his forest to claim a wish by killing the white-tailed stag. Each hunter has taken: a sip from the stream, a flower from the vine, wood to light a fire. Each hunter has subsequently died.

Prior is different; he takes nothing, instead asking for a god’s assistance in waking his sister from her sleeping sickness. Fenton—who is the forest and the white-tailed stag and a son of Old Nan and also, definitely, a god—decides to pack up the forest and help Prior out.

Where I come from, that sort of thing will get you a little kiss or two at the very least.

Tentacles get a bad rap, which is a shame.

What most people fail to appreciate is that each new tentacle is another location for a little kiss. Vesper Rune, a warm-hearted eldritch horror, has tentacles, and, as librarian Sebastian Rath can attest, each could do with at least one little kiss.

Jordan L Hawk, author of the popular Whyborne and Griffin series, is a titan in the world of kissable monstrosities, and the cultist-turned-hero Vesper Rune is possibly my favorite. After a lifetime of hiding, he finally finds a place where he can be safe, open about both his queerness and his untraditional anatomy, and receive many little kisses. Widdershins knows its own.