“What’s up, Tampon Strings?” are the very first words the reader encounters in A Jingle Bell Mingle. That sets the tone for this romance, which is sweet, fearlessly raunchy – and also very frustrating, sometimes enough to make you facepalm. I can’t exactly recommend it, but it might worth a glimpse if there’s nothing more exciting on the table.

Adult film star, director and wannabe screenwriter Sunny Palmer is also a makeup artist, cat mom (to Mr. Tumnus), and a dark-haired sassball who is hiding some deep pain; both of her parents are dead, and she’s estranged from her brother. Nonetheless, she’s had some good news recently – she’s sold her first script for a TV movie to The Hope Channel. But she’s within weeks of her deadline and hasn’t written a single line. Gulp. Off to Christmas Notch, Vermont to rediscover her muse.

Musician Isaac Kelly, former member of a boy band, is a widower who can’t move on from his late wife, Brooklyn. Isaac hasn’t written a single note since Brooklyn’s death, and his label is breathing down his neck, wanting a Christmas album out of him. He heads to Christmas Notch to get some sort of inspiration.

Conveniently enough, Sunny and Isaac are the BFFs of Bee Hobbes and Nolan Shaw (A Merry Little Meet Cute), who are getting married in Christmas Notch. Sunny and Isaac have a one-night stand in a crappy motel room after the reception and strike up a deal. Sunny will move into Nolan’s mansion so she won’t have to stay at said crappy motel during her inspiration sojourn, he will help her find out about the Christmas Notch Miracle, and she will help him find a new muse to get his creative juices flowing again. If they continue to clean each other’s plumbing in the meantime, it surely won’t lead to love, will it?

Of course not! Okay, okay, we all know better. A Jingle Bell Mingle is undone by several things, and just one of those things is that it doesn’t feel very Christmassy. Honestly, it could’ve been a Valentine’s Day romance with a couple of tweaks here and there. But that misstep is nothing compared to the introductory paragraph – where all the characters in the series so far are introduced by their full names, their relationships to each other, and their occupations in a dizzying barrage that’s heavy and clunky. It, and a similar epilogue, do this book such a disservice, because there’s some charm bubbling under the surface. Many readers are going to turn back under such heavy sledding, though, and that’s a shame. Additionally, you DEFINITELY need to read the first two books in the series because you’re going to be completely lost without the information divulged there..

Another problem is the lust-first romance of Sunny and Isaac. This book has the exact opposite problem from books infested with ‘I Love You, New Pretty Alive Mommy’ syndrome; Isaac loves Brooklyn so much and is so deeply sunk into his grief over her I honestly wondered why he was playing rumpy-pumpy with Sunny other than she’s a porn star and the authors seem to think readers are expecting lots of sex in this book. (There is, it’s worth noting, way more and way more daring sex in this instalment than in the other two). They bonk and bonk and bonk and Isaac refuses to realize his feelings until the last quarter in spite of all efforts and it make me want to strangle him. Sunny responds in kind, because love = pain.

The positive part of this is that Sunny has a spine of steel and won’t let herself take second place, which makes Isaac work for it and grow into his love for her. His love makes her want to reach out to her brother and heal that gap in her life. Whether Isaac actually deserves Sunny’s forgiveness, I leave up to the reader. It’s a mixed bag for me, in that I enjoyed them up to a point.

There’s some great stuff going on here, including the whole story behind the Christmas Notch Miracle, which connects to a ring of gossipy old ladies, and a World War II-era relationship between a Ronald, Bernice, and James that has a tragic ending and fuels Sunny’s latest project as the mystery surrounding their fate unspools.

Honestly? I wanted that triad’s romance to take over the novel. Or for Mr. Tumnus to perhaps get a chapter or two of his own.

A Jingle Bell Mingle frustrates because it could have been so much more than the sum of its parts. Alas and alack.