Red, White & Royal Blue meets The Nightmare Before Christmas in a sexy, quirky romcom where the golden-hearted Prince of Christmas falls for the totally off-limits Prince of Halloween.

Nicholas “Coal” Claus used to love Christmas. Until his father, the reigning Santa, turned the holiday into a PR façade. Coal will do anything to escape the spectacle, including getting tangled in a drunken, supremely hot make- out session with a beautiful man behind a seedy bar one night.

But the heir to Christmas is soon commanded to do his duty: he will marry his best friend, Iris, the Easter Princess and his brother’s not-so-secret crush. A situation that has disaster written all over it.

Things go from bad to worse when a rival arrives to challenge Coal for the princess’s hand…and Coal comes face-to-face with his mysterious behind-the-bar hottie: Hex, the Prince of Halloween.

It’s a fake competition between two holiday princes who can’t keep their hands off each other over a marriage of convenience that no one wants. And it all leads to one of the sweetest, sexiest, messiest, most delightfully unforgettable love stories of the year.

I really wanted this one to work for me. It has a genuinely fun concept on paper: rival holiday families, a politicized Christmas empire, Christmas and Halloween princes, and a gay romance that’s supposed to feel bold and festive all at once. Unfortunately, while the idea is solid, the execution never quite comes together.

The premise itself is clever. The commercialization of Christmas swallowing every other holiday is a real thing, and turning Santa into an overbearing, power-hungry oligarch is an interesting angle. I appreciated the attempt to satirize how capitalism has flattened holiday traditions into branding opportunities that start before the leaves even fall. That part of the story has teeth, at least conceptually. The problem was, the execution was a little too on the nose. The result is a tone that feels oddly mismatched: trying very hard to be sharp and grown-up, while the characters themselves feel emotionally undercooked.

Coal, our Christmas prince, was the biggest issue for me. He’s meant to be in his early twenties, but he reads far younger. His emotional range is incredibly narrow. He’s either sulking or horny, and that’s about it. Spending an entire book inside that headspace got exhausting fast. I wanted more complexity, more internal conflict, and more depth.

And unfortunately, he’s not alone. Most of the cast suffers from the same problem. Even the adults are all very one note. Many of the younger characters carry variations of the same unresolved “daddy issues,” which further reinforces how young this all feels. It has strong YA energy, despite being labeled otherwise.

Hex, the Prince of Halloween, had potential. The aesthetic alone should’ve carried more weight, but even he ends up flattened by the same writing choices. The banter doesn’t sparkle. The longing doesn’t simmer. Everything just… happens. And because I never connected with the characters, I never cared much about the outcome.

Which brings me to the romance and the spice. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the characters were aged up purely to justify explicit scenes. Those scenes didn’t add much to the story or the emotional arc, and instead felt awkward and oddly placed. Rather than heightening chemistry, they highlighted how little emotional groundwork had been laid. The romance itself never felt earned because the characters didn’t feel fully formed.

There’s also an identity issue at play. The book wants to be a sharp political satire, a holiday rom-com, a spicy romance, and a whimsical fantasy all at once. Instead of blending those elements, they compete for space. The result feels unfocused, like the story is trying to prove it’s mature rather than simply being so.

By the end, I wasn’t angry or offended. I was just underwhelmed. This feels like a book that was very close to being something special but didn’t quite trust itself enough to slow down, deepen its characters, or let the ideas breathe.

If you’re drawn to the concept and don’t mind shallow characterization, this might still be a fun seasonal diversion. For me, though, it didn’t deliver on what it promised. Cute idea. Almost there. But not a hit.