3 Stars for A Family Christmas for Wake & Cody by D.C. Williams

Title: A Family Christmas for Wake and Cody
Author Name: D.C. Williams
Publication Date & Length: December 11, 2014 – 61pgs

Best friends since kindergarten, Wake and Cody are starting their new lives together. If they can survive Christmas.

Wake Zakrewski’s huge and lively family has always treated Cody like another son. Now that the two best friends are lovers, will that change? Or will this Christmas be the very best one? And is Wake and Cody’s the only new romance in the family?

This was a quick and easy holiday read. I don’t know if it’s part of a series, but it worked fine as a stand-alone in either case.

Although I enjoyed the story, it did fall a little flat for me in the sense that there’s no real conflict. In fact, there really wasn’t even much romance. I appreciated that there wasn’t a huge, detailed sex scene (it was mostly fade-to-black and one that wasn’t very descriptive). Not every story needs that. But in this case, with very little else creating interest or tension, it probably would’ve been a good idea.

I didn’t especially like Wake or some members of his family. I understand that there was a bit of overt homophobia, but I thought the author could’ve done a better job either outright condemning it or showing us how Cody dealt with it. They were really obnoxious, and I honestly wouldn’t have wanted to be Cody. I couldn’t figure out what he liked about Wake, since Wake kept saying some of the same awful things–including referring to Cody as a f** and using that word as a slur more than once.

I was a little disappointed in how it seemed like the author was going out of her way not to have any characters be too feminine. I thought there was some great potential with the character Kenni, but I wasn’t crazy about the way things ended with him.

I appreciated the author not shying away from genuinely bisexual characters and especially for using the word bisexual (it’s easy to fall into the “it doesn’t need a label” trap). However, that was sort of negated for me by the other issues.

This wasn’t bad, but it ended up lacking enough to hold my interest.

3 stars

Amy

Amazon
Amazon UK
Amazon CA
Barnes & Noble

D.C. Williams is a writer who lives in Pennsylvania with one spouse and one child. I LOVE reader interaction. I used to add that I tended to “friend” people who added my books. I’ve taken that down because at this point I have people adding my books who I really haven’t interacted with at all. The first few months I was doing this I had run into most people who added my books somewhere on Goodreads. Since this is no longer really true (and I’ve long since eased up on the friendvites accordingly) I’m taking this down because I don’t want to discourage people who don’t enjoy author interaction from reading my books. That said, I enjoy reader interaction as much as ever, and please, feel free to add me!