New Hope, Old Grudges

By Anne Malcom

176 pages of holiday romance.

The Ugly Truth:

I needed a quick palette cleanser after diving into all the emotionally dark and twisted bully romances of the past few days, so I snagged this off of, where else, BookTok and rolled with it.

New Hope Old Grudges brings to the table exactly what it says it will, holiday spice. It follows the story of Willow Watson moving back to her hometown of New Hope – or No Hope, as she refers to it as – after her life in LA has fallen completely apart. Think Hallmark movie 101, the successful corporate girly coming back to the hunky-dory town she swore she would never return to. Immediately she is thrown into the path of old time rival and bully (but… we never are really shown this, again QUICK BOOK), Brody Adams. He has forgotten all about this red-haired beauty and wants to remedy the situation more or less immediately.

I will be the first to say you can crank this out in about two hours. There is not much built into it; a lot of the book can be guessed, and yet, you are still pleasantly surprised at how happily things turn out. Sometimes I need to know there are normal, somewhat vanilla, love stories still being written to remind yourself that reality is still a thing. I enjoyed the fact that this was all relatively plausible and that you still felt happy for the characters despite nothing MAJOR going down.