a sweet holiday childhood friends to lovers romance!

pros:
- sweet main couple, very steamy and likable
- the plot is largely driven forward by mae's actions and trying to figure out her mid-twenties crisis and inability to chase the things she wants
- i liked the writing
- builds the sexual tension rly well
- catharsis for decades of romantic yearning, soulmate-in-love-for-permanent kind of love
- if you're into big romantic gestures, you'll love this
- if you're super into christmas, you'll love this
- mixed family dynamics, healthy and supportive family relationships
- overall just a tooth-achingly sweet romance with a HEA

cons:
- i wish the other characters had been better developed; there was a decent cast of characters which were fine on their own, but i thought the relationships between them could've been stronger. this con is mainly for theo; his friendship with mae should've been given more screentime. it's constantly emphasised how "falling for your best friend's brother is so complicated", but theo and mae never really feel like best friends which kinda takes the sense of urgency out of the trope. it wasn't until the very end that i thought theo was anything more than just an asshole. the pitch was about mae being trapped between her best friend and her best friend's brother, but that trope just felt sort of hastily discarded; it never evolves into an actual issue except for one brief scene where the main issue was actually miscommunication. i actually felt kinda bad for theo by the end; we're just not gonna mention that he pined over mae the way she pined over andrew for decades? and he's just supposed to get over it in a day and be happy for them? don't get me wrong, i loved mae and andrew's romance, but lowkey rip theo :/ i wish that whole had been handled with more nuance

- the time travel: the groundhog day trope was DEEPLY under-utilised here, i'm on the verge of calling it misused. mae realises she's in a time loop super quickly, and only relives the day three times, which doesn't feel nearly long enough for her to arrive at the conclusions she does. it's not long enough to enjoy the chaos of time loops in the first place; she doesn't even relive the days enough time to reliably know what's going to happen before it does, which is the main appeal of the trope imo.

- second time travel con: it doesn't make sense. i know this trope is rarely given an actual scientific explanation, but usually it at least follows some rule, however arbitrary (the day resets at the end, you die when you get killed by the person chasing you down, etc). there was no rule in this book; mae was allowed to live thru several days (almost a week?) without any resetting. at some point i forgot this was even a time loop story. basically i'm trying to say that in a time loop story, the time loop was not present nearly
often enough. this leads me to

- third time travel con: weirdest conflict ever. despite the logistical issues i was having a grand old time with this, then the climax happened and i was so confused. mae confesses about her time loop situation to andrew, and instead of focusing on the time loop (which he hardly even believes at first) he's hung up on the idea that mae kissed theo in a hypothetical different timeline??? firstly, they've had really good communication for the whole book up till now, and for some reason this is andrew's breaking point. mae even explicitly says that she does not feel that way about theo, it was a drunk kiss, and they both hated it. maybe this is just me but if i had breakups with every best friend i've drunkenly made out with, i would have no friends left. it wasn't even a true love triangle, because mae and theo were never romantically involved, emotionally or physically. and yes, i recognise that andrew was upset bc he thought mae kissed theo bc she assumed she couldn't have andrew without even asking andrew, but he literally didn't tell mae how he felt either! i don't feel like
he has a lot of room to complain! his high horse is literally on the ground! it just felt like a silly conflict to have andrew storm out, when present-day mae was standing there telling andrew that she loved him. it was, as mae put it, the equivalent of getting mad at someone for something they did in a dream.

verdict: this is steamy, atmospheric, and romantic. just don't think about it too hard.