Book Review: Wreck the Halls
Ah, the holidays. A time for seasonal drinks, twinkle lights, and reuniting your estranged rock star mothers on live TV to perform one last show 30 years after a sold out concert went horribly wrong, causing the biggest rock duo of the time to dissolve in a flurry of rumors and confusion.
OK maybe that’s not everyone’s holiday experience, but in Tessa Bailey’s Wreck the Halls it certainly is in the case of Beat Dawkins and Melody Gallard, whose mothers were once known as the rock duo Steel Birds, but haven’t seen each other in 30 years. When one of their hit songs has a bout of viral success, a reality TV producer recruits Beat and Melody to reunite their mothers via a live reality series for a one-night-only reunion on Christmas Eve. Complicating things slightly is the fact that Beat and Melody have been crushing on each other since their one and only meeting - an all-too-brief encounter when they were 16 - and are now supposed to deal with these feelings while being tailed by a camera crew.
Despite being set at Christmas, and the ticking clock of the whole thing being a Christmas Eve concert at Rockefeller Center, the focus of Wreck The Halls is more on the former fame of Steel Birds, the mystery around their breakup, and the toll that fame had on both Beat and Melody, who were born after the band broke up, but still feel weighed down by the associated pressures. Where Melody’s struggles felt fairly straightforward, the award for hot emotional mess has to go to Beat, who has a lot to work through in this book.
Their chemistry, however, was very sweet and the dynamic very believable. Their mothers might hurl insults at each other as easily as breathing, but it’s clear the two of them like each other right away, and are at least willing to give this friend thing a try while they try to figure out how else they can be together and make it work. I’d make some joke about the two of them making Santa’s naughty list when they do eventually get together, but they manage to be so sweet even when they’re being “naughty”. Could I be coming around on friends to lovers? Huge if true.
All this to say, Wreck the Halls takes a friends-to-lovers relationship, mixed together with a True Hollywood Story mystery, all sprinkled with a dash of Christmas for a blend that sounds like it shouldn’t work, but winds up being a really fun read.
Wreck the Halls hits shelves on October 3. Special thank you to Avon for the advance copy for review purposes.
