Heating Up the Holidays is a 3 story bundle with Play With Me by Lisa Renee Jones, Snowfall by Mary Ann Rivers, and After Midnight by Serena Bell.

I want to devote this whole review to Snowfall because I overwhelmingly loved this novella. I count myself as incredibly lucky to have read Mary Ann Rivers’ debut of The Story Guy just a few months ago. I fell in love with her intelligent and humorous writing then but hoped that it wasn’t just a one time thing. This second novella shows me that I’m not to be disappointed!

Jenny Wright moves into her new housing in Ohio where she is doing research as a Microbiologist. When she moves in she gets mail for the previous tenant which leads to online communication between herself as “Lincoln” and “C’. They begin to flirt online back and forth less and less innocently. Meanwhile Jenny is dealing with slowly losing her sight due to a degenerative disease. She’s horrified at this idea and cannot wrap her mind around this. Jenny is working with Evan Ford, her Occupational Therapist to try to make her life a little more manageable while the changes happen.

I cannot express my love for this book and this author in the right way. Yes there are scientific and technical terms throughout the book due to Jenny’s technical occupation. Halle-freaking-lujah! I, for one, was so happy to read a book, even a novella, that had an intelligent woman, with a scientific job as the main character. I’m not a scientific person but I was able to read this just fine. There are many books that tend to be dumbed down in general and I didn’t feel like this at all with this book. I was racing to get to the end of the novella, the last 20% or so I finished and then immediately re-read because I was doing my speed reading to get to the ending.

Jenny and Evan are so very real, very funny people. Jenny does not take slowly losing her eyesight very well and tends to throw fits, which I can only imagine would be the case in the real world. I just really appreciate the intelligence and humorous insight that this novella seems to have.

So obviously, I am supposed to be having some kind of therapeutic moment here, where my other senses get honed on the strap of this exercise and maybe later I’ll finger-spell W-A-T-E-R into his ginormous hand and we’ll embrace with joyous laughter.

Also there is a small piece at the end of the story that just about killed me. A very small detail which will probably stick with me for a very long time.

I absolutely cannot wait for the full length novel debut of Mary Ann Rivers, Live, coming in January of 2014. I have a feeling that she will be an auto buy for me for pretty much ever.

Buy it Now Heating Up the Holidays 3-Story Bundle (Play with Me, Snowfall, and After Midnight): A Loveswept Contemporary Romance