As a six year old, Jessica swears she was cured of leukemia by Santa Claus. Sixteen years later, she’s still obsessed with her savior, going so far as to making sure her duplex has a fireplace and the thesis for her Folklore degree is, basically, “Santa does exist!!!” Kristarkon Clausarkar, is an alien xenobiologist who’d just collected a herd of reindeer for study when a meteor storm damaged his ship, rendering him trapped on Earth and causing an anti-gravity field leak that imbued the reindeer with special powers and himself with immortality and the ability to heal others. With the three other members of his crew, he visits and helps a hundred children every year on Christmas Eve. Jessica is the only child who’s ever woken up while he was treating them, and she’s the only one he keeps checking back on year after year. He always picks at least one kid in Jessica’s neighborhood as an excuse to go visit her every Christmas. During the stop to help one such kid, his tech malfunctions and he ends up stuck halfway down a chimney, and his engineer back on the ship is having a temper tantrum, so Blitzen the reindeer runs off to get Jessica, who takes finding out that Santa is actually an alien pretty well, honestly.
“Never in her life would she have imagined her Santa could turn out to be such an incredible man. She had always known he had a special gift to share with the world and that he was the kindest most gentlest man on the planet, but she never would have thought of him as… well… sexy as sin. And he was. The man who held her so gently in his arms was the sexiest and most delicious man she’d ever met. And he tasted like peppermint and smelled like Christmas cookies. Two of her favorite things.”
Look, I’m just going to leave the summary there, because if you haven’t had, like, a million WTF moments from that paragraph alone, I’m not really sure what else to say. Besides her obsessive love of Santa, Jessica’s pretty lacking in any sort of character development. She’s a virgin (of course), which doesn’t stop her from enjoying multiple rounds of (badly written) sexy time once Kris takes her back to his ship (oh, after he and his crew make her hot cocoa because I dunno why not). I was willing to overlook the eyerollingly awful insta-love for the first bit of the book, but after Jesica helps Kris and the rest of his crew finish off their Christmas list, the plot pretty much grinds to a halt. What would normally be the big “black moment” scene – where the couple fears they have irreconcilable differences and therefore their HEA is in jeopardy – is actually Christmas dinner at Jessica’s foster mom’s place. I will say this had a lot of potential (Santa as an alien xenobiologist is super intriguing) but it never goes anywhere with it, and there’s too much weird crap left unchallenged. When Jessica realizes that Kris has basically been spying on her for the past sixteen years (his magical tech version of “he sees you when you’re sleeping”) rather than being creeped out, she thinks it’s endearing. The swear words consist of “Snowballs!” and “Oh thank jingle-bells” and “holy sparkling tinsel,” and not only can Kris’s magic fingers can be used to heal people, they, more mundanely, can act as the perfect hair dryer for curly hair. Let’s not even get in to the fact that he’s responsible for the reindeer gaining basic intelligence, but he’s kept them semi-enslaved for the past couple of hundred years for their own good.
“You know what? You might not be the original Santa, but you are him. You make this day the most special day of the year for those most in need. If that’s not Santa, then I don’t know who he is.”
OK, I’ve made this crazysauce sound much more interesting than it is – the stuff I’ve listed is basically the best parts of the book. The rest is 140-something pages of sheer boredom that I kept reading in the hopes that it would redeem itself. Overall, I can’t really recommend this, even for the crazy WTF factor.