The naughty (and I don’t mean in the smexy way) list of holiday fails has been at an all-time high this year. I am not sure if it is a matter of everything having been done before, authors being uninspired, or other factors but this year I’ve yet to actually recommend a holiday read. Today I want to quickly go over some recent “DNF” holiday reads releasing in 2014.

On the Naughty List gets a DNF because after reading two F grade novellas I couldn’t be bothered to continue. Lori Foster’s  offering (Christmas Bonus) was an innocent young woman and older man tale that had some twists, unfortunately for the worst. Next up I read the Carly Phillips offering (Naughty Under the Mistletoe) which managed to be both insta-love (as in, less than 24hrs) and creepy. The hero insists she wears bells so he can hear them ring as he bangs her. I mean eww.

Considering how awful these two stories were, and how not smexy, I simply couldn’t continue on with the others.

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Oh, Naughty Night! by Leslie Kelly opens with Lulu and her friends at a Halloween celebration at a bar. In walks an incredibly sexy man – and oh my. It’s her neighbor from childhood! The one she used to bully and be horrible to. The pair hit it off immediately, but thanks to her wig and fake name she gives Chaz never realizes that he actually knows Lulu.

I was intrigued by the idea of this story but when the author chose to send them from the bar into a bank outer lobby accessed by our hero’s ATM card for a quick blow job I started to have issues. By the end of that scene I deleted the book off my kindle never to look back.

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When the Snow Falls  Candy Canes and Cupid by Fern Michaels begins with a first chapter so boring, so painful in detail and information dump that I don’t even care what the plot is. She’s detailing the kind of ipad she has. Telling us the actual dates that the employees will have off for the holidays. I imagined this heroine as the kind of person who corners you and tells you long winded stories because how much she loves the sound of her own voice. I had to run away in horror. White Hot Christmas by Nancy Bush is a first person story and I immediately disliked the voice of this character. I this, I that… usually I’m a first person fan but I was so irritated about hearing from this character that I didn’t last three pages.

At this point, I had a headache and didn’t want to keep torturing myself so I set the book down and walked away from it.

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Is it fair to not try all the books in a grouping like two of my DNFed books here today? Maybe, but these kinds of stories tend to be grouped in ways that the publisher feels will appeal to a reader and so they usually have a similar style or tone to some extent. Given that I’ve never in all my years failed half the book and raved about the other stories, I felt the better choice was to let these go.

Here’s hoping I can find some smexy Xmas elsewhere in my fiction this year!