Christmas Mouse Review: Is It Worth Reading?

Verdict: A warm, tradition-stuffed sapphic Christmas romance about two women who both adore the holiday and bet on whose version is better, held back by so little conflict that some readers drift off before the bet is settled.

Best for: Readers who want a low-angst, Hallmark-style holiday read with two kind, grown-up leads and a lot of cocoa, carols and snow, and who don’t need a big third-act blowup to stay hooked.

Heat level: ★★★☆☆ (3/5: open door, on the mild end)

Rating: ★★★★☆ (3.8/5: a 4.09 Goodreads average across 474 ratings, with “too cozy” as the one complaint that keeps coming back)

Tropes: Holiday bet, city girl and country girl, opposites attract, Christmas traditions, small town, low angst, meet at Thanksgiving, slow build, found family side cast, compromise over grand gesture.

Christmas Mouse is a 2022 standalone contemporary lesbian romance by Rachel Spangler, published through Brisk Press, that splits its December between a small Vermont town and Manhattan, and builds its whole engine on a Vermont woodworker and a New York doctor who each think their Christmas is the real one.

It holds a 4.09 average across 474 Goodreads ratings, 3.95 on StoryGraph from 128 reviews, and 4.6 stars from 258 ratings on Amazon. The author is a four-time Lambda Literary finalist with a long backlist, and this is one of her quieter books. Readers mostly love it for exactly that, but a steady handful say it’s so gentle they stalled. Both camps are worth hearing before you start.

What Is Christmas Mouse About?

This is a holiday romance in the most literal sense. Christmas isn’t the backdrop here, it’s the plot. Nearly every chapter is built around a tradition, from the music and the food to the carols and the movies. If you’ve ever wished a sapphic book would just commit to the Hallmark formula and not apologize for it, that’s what this one does, and it does it with a small-town side cast that gossips like small towns do.

Ava Collins builds things with her hands in rural Vermont and can’t see why anyone would spend December in a city. Bex Leone is an anesthesiologist who thinks New York at Christmas is the best show on earth. Neither of them is a Grinch, which is the twist readers keep pointing out. The usual setup has one cynic and one believer. Here both women are believers, and they just can’t agree on where to believe.

What Makes This Sapphic Christmas Romance Work

Two people who both love Christmas: Reviewers on Goodreads and Amazon single this out again and again. With no grump to convert, the book skips the sulking and spends its pages on the fun part.
The traditions themselves: “Immersive” is the word that keeps turning up. Readers say they could taste the food and wanted to visit both places, including people who live nowhere near snow.
A healthy rivalry: The bet is competitive but never mean. Several reviewers praise how much the two leads respect each other’s turf, which fits readers who’ve had their fill of holiday romances built on sniping.
Communication over drama: Reviewers name open communication and real compromise as the reason it feels grown up. Bex’s career isn’t something she can just quit, and the book treats that as a real problem.
The side cast: Gram and Ava’s cousin Howie get specific praise, and one reviewer singles out the small-town gossip as a highlight. Not everyone, though. Two readers name one relative as plain unpleasant.

Book Synopsis

Bex Leone works long hours as a doctor in New York and lives for the city in December, all the lights and noise and sparkle of it. When a colleague, Howie, drags her up to Vermont for Thanksgiving, she lands at a family table in a town she’d never have picked, and across from a woman she’d absolutely pick.

That woman is Ava Collins, Howie’s cousin, a woodworker who loves Christmas every bit as much as Bex does and is certain it belongs in the mountains, not on Fifth Avenue. The spark is there right away. So is the argument. By the end of the meal, a friendly disagreement has turned into a proper wager. Ava will spend two weekends in Manhattan, Bex will spend two weekends in Vermont, and each of them will throw everything she has at proving her holiday is the best one.

What follows is a month of showing off. There are big-city spectacles and small-town rituals, family recipes and childhood memories, and a lot of time spent in each other’s company. The better they get at sharing the season, the clearer it gets that this isn’t just about tinsel anymore. Their lives are rooted in two very different places, and both of them know that falling for someone usually means somebody gives something up. As Christmas gets closer, the question shifts from who wins the bet to what each of them is actually willing to lose.

My Review

The premise is the best thing about it, and it’s a smart one. Making both women Christmas obsessives takes away the usual “teach the cynic to feel joy” arc and swaps in something more interesting: two people who already agree on what matters and disagree on how to live it. That’s a real relationship question dressed up in a Santa hat, and Spangler knows it.

The second strength is how kind it is. These are two adults who talk to each other. When something bothers one of them, she says so, and the other listens. Readers keep calling the competition “healthy,” and I’d agree. The banter has bite but never cruelty, and the book takes Bex’s job seriously instead of treating a demanding medical career as a flaw to be fixed by moving to the country. One reviewer, a romance author himself, said that was exactly what made the ending work for him.

Now the catch, and it isn’t just my gripe. The most repeated criticism in the reviews is that there’s barely any tension. One three-star Goodreads reader says it took her ages to finish because nearly every conversation circles back to Christmas activities or city versus country. Another says it’s a little too cozy, with not enough pining to push the bet forward. A third notes the dark moment arrives very late. Add a couple of readers who found it long or slightly heavy-handed, plus one who thought the first tenth was weak, and you get a clear pattern: if a romance needs friction to keep you reading, this one will feel slow around the middle.

There’s also a smaller craft note. One reader flags missing punctuation, a few continuity slips and dialogue that sometimes sounds more like an email than a conversation. That’s one voice, not a theme, and most reviews praise the writing. Still, if stiff dialogue bugs you, it’s worth knowing going in.

Here’s the expectation to reset. The marketing hints at a real question about what each woman might lose, and that question does land, but late and gently. If “what are they willing to lose” made you brace for a painful breakup, relax. If it made you hope for one, you’ll be underfed.

My honest note: A lovely, generous holiday book that trades tension for comfort, and mostly gets away with it. If you want a sapphic Hallmark movie on the page, this is close to perfect. If you need stakes to turn the pages, start it knowing it’s a slow sip, not a shot.

Element	In Christmas Mouse
Central relationship	Ava Collins and Bex Leone: Vermont woodworker and New York anesthesiologist, opposites who both love Christmas
Core tropes	Holiday bet, city girl and country girl, opposites attract, small town, low angst, compromise
Setting	A small Vermont mountain town and Manhattan, Thanksgiving to Christmas
Heat level	3/5: open door, mild, one intimate scene readers mention
Series	Standalone with an HEA; a later book, Quiver, follows a side character
Content notes	On-page sex, an unpleasant relative, a passing medical procedure reference one listener disliked; no StoryGraph warning set visible to us

How Spicy Is Christmas Mouse?

romance.io puts it at 3 out of 5, labelled “Open door,” though that’s from only seven ratings. Readers place it at the soft end of that band. One Goodreads reviewer calls the spice PG, another says the heat is very low, and a third praises “a very well written intimate scene,” singular. A UK Amazon reviewer actually liked it because it skips the detailed sex scenes she’s tired of. On the other side, one Amazon reviewer files it under “steamy,” and another reader calls the spice level just right.

So: the door opens, briefly, and the romance never leans on it. Nobody flags anything you’d want warned about in the intimate content itself. If you want something with a similar open-door warmth, The Holiday Treatment runs a touch hotter, and When the Bell Rings sits at the same on-page but limited level.

Who Should Read This Book?

You’ll likely love it if: you start your holiday playlist in November, you want low angst and open communication, you enjoy setting and ritual as much as plot, and you like your leads to be adults with careers they won’t drop.

You may want to skip it if: you need pining and tension to stay hooked, too much Christmas talk wears you out, you want a dramatic third act, or you were planning to listen rather than read (more on the audiobook below).

In short: It’s comfort reading first and a romance second, and that order is the whole appeal or the whole problem.

What Readers Are Actually Saying (October 2026)

There’s no viral moment here, and I couldn’t find any organic BookTok buzz. No trade outlet reviewed it either. Amazon’s editorial block holds only the author bio. What it does have is a quiet, persistent life on Reddit. It turns up as a recommendation in r/sapphicbooks, r/LGBTBooks, r/WLW and r/BooksThatFeelLikeThis whenever someone asks for low-stress, joyful or Hallmark-style sapphic reads, and those threads keep coming back each winter. A fair caution: several of those comments use the same “R Spangler” phrasing, so some of that footprint may be a few loyal fans rather than a crowd. Still, Goodreads reviews keep arriving every December, from 2022 right through to January 2026, and that’s how this book finds people. It’s a seasonal reread recommendation, passed hand to hand.

Why readers love it (according to the discourse): The traditions come first by a distance. Reviewers say they felt like they were doing the activities themselves, and more than one says it made them want to visit Vermont, New York or both. The Hallmark comparison is everywhere, usually as praise (one Amazon reviewer calls it the queer Christmas movie readers have been waiting for), and one Goodreads reader likes that the book nods at those tropes knowingly. StoryGraph’s crowd backs this up: 93% call it lighthearted and 93% call the characters loveable. A few readers say outright that it’s going in their annual reread pile, which is high praise for a holiday book.

What readers argue about and complain about: Low conflict, above everything. It’s the most common reason for a three-star rating. Readers describe it as slow or too cozy, with characters so nice they’re almost too perfect. The same quality is exactly why other people rate it five stars, so this one is down to taste. Second: the audiobook. It’s narrated by Ann Shanks Etter, and listener reactions are rough. One Goodreads reviewer gave up after 40 minutes, another quit at 36% saying it sounded almost like AI narration, an Amazon reviewer complained about poor sound quality and said she wouldn’t recommend listening, and a fellow author found the performance too peppy. Two listeners liked it and praised the distinct voices. On balance, read it in print or ebook. Third: the ending’s logistics. One reader felt the epilogue was just another chapter and skipped how the couple actually solves the distance problem, and two others wondered how the relationship would work once the holidays were over. Smaller notes from single readers: the “country mouse, city mouse” labels get repeated a lot, and there’s a rich-girl, poor-girl dynamic one reviewer didn’t enjoy.

The standalone question worth asking first: It’s a complete standalone with a happy ending, and you don’t need anything else to read it. A later book, Quiver, follows one of the side characters, according to an Amazon reviewer who picked it up next. If you like Spangler’s voice and want more depth, her most-read book on our site, In Development, sits at 4.26 across more than 2,000 Goodreads ratings, and Thrust is at 4.27. Both are rated higher than this one and both have more bite.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Christmas Mouse a standalone?

Yes. It tells one complete love story with a happy ending. A later book, Quiver, follows a side character, but you don’t need it.

How spicy is Christmas Mouse?

A 3/5 on romance.io, which labels it open door. Readers describe it as mild, with one intimate scene and a romance that doesn’t depend on heat.

Does Christmas Mouse have a happy ending?

Yes. Ava and Bex end up together and readers call the ending satisfying. One reviewer wished the epilogue showed more of how they handle the distance.

Is there a lot of angst in Christmas Mouse?

No. It’s low angst by design, and 93% of StoryGraph reviewers call it lighthearted. A few readers found it too calm and slow because of that.

Is the Christmas Mouse audiobook good?

Opinions are mostly negative. The narration by Ann Shanks Etter drew complaints about sound quality and delivery, including two listeners who quit early, so most readers will do better with the ebook or paperback.

If You Loved Christmas Mouse, Read These Next

One Goodreads reader reached straight for Wrong Number, Right Woman by Jae, which has the same kind, low-drama grown-up romance. The Christmas Pic keeps the city meets small town Hallmark setup but turns the heat up a lot. And Make My Wish Come True gives you another cozy small town at Christmas with even less spice. For more, browse our cozy Christmas romance picks or the full Book Reviews archive.

The Bottom Line

Christmas Mouse wants to be a sapphic holiday movie you can read, and it gets there. The traditions are vivid, the two leads are kind and grown up, and the central question about whose life bends is a real one. What holds it back is the flip side of all that comfort: very little tension, a middle some readers found slow, and an ending that tells you they’ll figure out the distance without really showing it. If you want a gentle December read you’ll come back to next year, it’s well worth it. Check Christmas Mouse on Amazon →

The Eikna Overall Ranking

On the Eikna scale, Christmas Mouse ranks as a classic low-angst sapphic Christmas comfort read. It’s strong on tradition, kindness and atmosphere, and held back by how little friction it allows. Read it for the cocoa and the carols, not for the heartbreak.