YA Novelties

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This kind of stuff was never my kind of thing. The whole "fauxmance," celebrity falling in love with average girl, and the Christmas timing didn't really seem to be possible to spin together a decent paragraph, let alone a contemporary novel. To my surprise, Decked with Holly succeeds in being a cohesive novel with tons of laughs, snark, and cheers. However, this doesn't mean I really enjoyed reading this book.

Decked with Holly is basically a pity party for poor Holly, a girl who is suffering under circumstances that aren't really explained, except for the fact that her aunt and two girl cousins enjoy bullying her. Yeah, I hope that I'm not the only one who is wondering why. Don't bother wasting your energy on that, it's never explained. Just letting the story flow was the key to me being able to finish this, but not fully enjoy this book as so many others have. When Holly and Dominic meet, nothing really sparks between them, except maybe pepper spray, vomit, and heated words. The story really starts going from there, as Holly is forced to have a fake relationship with Nick with the typical hijinks that occur with jealousy, paparazzi, and pride.

There, however, was some character growth for the main protagonists that really drew me in. We see poor little Holly, "the Mess," with the tendency to always find herself in the most ridiculous of situations, grow up to becomes a somewhat confident girl who doesn't feel hurt as much by her bullying cousins. Note: there wasn't much character development for any character due to the ridiculously short amount of time fleshing out the characters, but what we've seen with Holly is good enough for this book. Nick, meanwhile, is the one who I really enjoyed reading about. He begins as a sort of bully, with his high and mighty tails of greatness following him everywhere. Holly is able to put Nick down without much effort multiple times, which allows Nick to become a more relatable and sweet character.


This book is a cute and fluffy read Nothing really made this stand out compared to the other thousands of contemporaries with rock stars and fauxmances. We have the ever-arguing twosome that are way too arrogant to ever admit that they're falling in love. Then there's this clique of blondies with their ability to destroy everything, but actually just make everything ten times more ridiculous (and hilarious). Their over-the-top antics to hook up with Nick are just some of the more cliched routes that this book chooses to go. Basically, this book was a nice pile of fluffy cliche all rolled into one punny title. I won't say that I found it yucky, but this book is definitely one of the thousands of books that come and go with the same plot that are fun, enjoyable reads to pass the time.

Angie @YA Novelties