Review: Heating Up the Holidays by Jill Shalvis, Jacquie D’Alessandro, Jamie Sobrato.

Hero: Dustin Mauer, Brad Griffin, Ryan Quinn
Heroine: Christina Lewis, Toni Rizzo, Lorelei Gibson
Grade: 4.5 out of 5, 3.5 out of 5, 3.25 out of 5

All He Wants for Christmas… by Jill Shalvis EMT Dustin Mauer has one Christmas wish—to make tough firefighter Cristina Lewis realize she’s in love with him. And he’s using his considerable bedside charm to convince her!

My Grown-Up Christmas List by Jacquie D’Alessandro Toni Rizzo is done with obnoxious firefighters. But flirtatious fireman Brad Griffin is managing to put himself at the top of her holiday list—one steamy kiss at a time!

Up on the Housetop by Jamie Sobrato When Dr. Lorelei Gibson gets stuck on her roof half-naked, she’s mortified when she’s rescued by hunky firefighter Ryan Quinn—her high school heartbreak! Until she learns he’d like to get naked with her…

I read this book last month for my Category romance but never got around to posting my review for it (or writing it for that matter) so is it considered cheating if I put my review for this one up now? I hope not.

But anyway, on with the review.

All He Wants For Christmas by Jill Shalvis- This is Dustin and Christina’s story. If you’ve read the other stories in this series (Flashpoint and Flashback) then you’ve met these two before. Dustin has been hung up on Christina for a very long time and Christina likes him back but she won’t give into her desires because she’s a little scaredy cat. Christina is all tough and macho at work and she doesn’t do messy emotions. She doesn’t do silly things like fall in love because she’s much too tough for something like that. Dustin, on the other hand is all for those messy emotions because he’s not afraid of his feelings. He has some serious feelings for Dustin and what I loved most about him is that he didn’t shy away from them. He didn’t put up a front, he let it be known that he was in love with Christina and was there, waiting for her to realize that they were meant to be together.

I thought Jill Shalvis did a fantastic job telling their story. Dustin and Christina’s story start in the other books but it ends with this one and I think that Jill did a fantastic job of slamming a great story into such a short paged story. It didn’t feel rushed or anything and my only problem was that I wanted a little bit more but I wasn’t too disappointed. I enjoyed Dustin and Christina and even though there were times that I wanted to slap Christina upside her head a few times, I thought this was a great character driven book. I definitely recommend.

4.5 out of 5

I’m curious about Dustin’s brother Jason for sure though.

My Grown Up Christmas Wish by Jacquie D’Alessandro- This story follows Brad Griffin and Toni Rizzo as they journey toward their happy ending. I thought it was a cute addition but Tori got on my nerves a bit when she kept putting Brad. He did some really sweet things to try to get her attention and the way that she kept putting this enormously hot and ridiculously sweet man off because of things that he had absolutely nothing to do with made me want to karate chop Toni in the knee caps. This book ends up being really cute and it’s a great addition to this anthology.

3.5 out of 5

Up on the Housetop by Jamie Sobrato- I’ve never read anything by this author before but I’d like to see what her longer stories would be like. I think I would have enjoyed this story a little more had it been a little longer. This story was shorter than the other two stories in this anthology and I wish there had been more to Lorelei and Ryan’s story. Ryan was all things hunky but it would have been nice to get to know them a bit more and to feel as if their relationship wasn’t rushed because it felt that way. Lorelei wasn’t a bad heroine but I just didn’t feel as if I knew her very much after the story was done.

3.25 out of 5

As a whole, this anthology was quite an entertaining read and I would definitely recommend this to anyone who is in the mood for sexy firefighting love. It’s made me put two authors that I haven’t tried before on my list so that’s gotta count for something, right?

All in all, I’d give this anthology a 4.25 out of 5.

This book is available from Harlequin Blaze. You can buy it here or here in e-format.

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