A Merry Little Meet Cute

Made-for-TV Christmas movies run on wholesomeness the way engines run on fuel, and Julie Murphy and Sierra Simone's 2022 collaboration casts, as the lead of exactly such a movie, an adult-film performer hoping nobody on set recognises her. The desk shelves it as the season's boldest wager, a book betting that maximum sweetness and maximum heat can share a bloodstream, and reports that the wager pays.

Bee Hobbes has built a career on camera under another name, values the work and says so, and lands a mainstream break starring in a Hope Channel Christmas romance. Her co-star is Nolan Shaw, former boy-band bad boy rehabilitating an image the tabloids shredded, supporting a family whose needs are written with unexpected seriousness. He recognises her within pages, because he has been, the book cheerfully confirms, a devoted fan, and the double secret, her past and his knowledge of it, powers a romance that is somehow both filthy and profoundly kind. The threatened outing, when the plot reaches for it, and everything about how the set and the network respond, stays sealed.

What we admire most is the sincerity under the premise. A lesser book plays Bee's career as a joke or a wound; this one writes it as a job she is good at and unashamed of, and aims its judgement instead at the machinery of respectability that requires her to hide. Nolan's anxiety and his caretaking load at home are given genuine weight between the comic set pieces, and the Christmas-movie production itself is affectionately skewered by authors who clearly love what they are mocking. The dual authorship shows in the best way, Murphy's warmth and Simone's voltage in working alternation. Even the movie-within-the-book earns its runtime, its sanitised script winking at the novel around it.

The heat, at eye level, is very high, explicit, frequent, and enthusiastically choreographed; the desk states this in bold for the shelf's Hallmark-adjacent browsers, who should understand the adjacency runs one direction only.

Honest notices: explicit content at the genre's upper range, sex work depicted respectfully and centrally, outing anxiety, panic attacks on the page, tabloid cruelty, and a parent's mental illness written with real attention in the background. Sweet does not mean tame here, anywhere.

Who is this for? Readers who want their cocoa spiked, defenders of unashamed heroines, recovering boy-band devotees, and anyone who has watched a channel Christmas movie and wondered about the actors' real lives. The desk read it in two evenings and mailed its copy to the friend it was always going to belong to.