Reviewed by Larissa
TITLE: Home for the Holidays: Mr. Frosty Pants and Mr. Naughty List Box Set
SERIES: Home for the Holidays
AUTHOR: Leta Blake
PUBLISHER: self-published
RELEASE DATE: October 30, 2020
LENGTH: 558 pages
BLURB:
MR FROSTY PANTS
Frosty former friends get a steamy second chance in this Christmas gay romance!
Can true love warm his frozen heart?
When Casey Stevens went away to college four years ago, he ghosted on his straight best friend, Joel Vreeland. He hoped time and distance would lessen the unrequited affection he felt, but all it did was make him miss Joel more. Home for the holidays, Casey hopes they might find a way to be friends again. But Joel’s frosty reception reminds Casey of just how hard he had to fight to be Joel’s friend in the first place. It’s going to take a Christmas miracle to get past that cool façade again.
Joel isn’t as straight as Casey believes, and his years of pining for Casey have left him hurting and alone, caring for his abusive father and struggling to get by. Unable to trust anyone except his rescue dog—and with no reason to believe Casey is interested in him for more than a holiday fling—Joel’s icy heart might shatter before it can thaw.
Can Casey and Joel’s love overcome mistrust, parental rejection, class differences, and four long years apart?
Mr. Frosty Pants is a stand-alone, Christmas gay romance by Leta Blake featuring a virgin hero, childhood friends-to-lovers, second chance romance, and steamy mm first times.
MR NAUGHTY LIST
A cute teacher gets a spanking this Christmas. How hot can it get being on his former student’s Naughty List?
Is Aaron allowed to want a hot holiday fling with his young former student? Even more forbidden, is he allowed to want this student to spank him?
It’s another Christmas, and Aaron is still in the closet as a gay man and a natural submissive. With one youthful indiscretion blacking his ethics record, he can’t afford to indulge his desires no matter how pent up and needy that leaves him.
Until his former student comes home for the holidays.
Dominant and charming, RJ knows what Aaron needs—intense, steamy encounters and a firm hand. As Christmas nears, RJ helps Aaron unlock his true self. But family and fallout await, and all good things must end.
Or can their hot holiday affair turn them into lasting lovers?
Mr. Naughty List is a steamy Christmas MM romance set in the Home for the Holidays series that began with Mr. Frosty Pants, but can be read as a standalone. Featuring hot former student/teacher dynamics, and, of course, warm, sweet holiday feels complete with a strong happy ending.
REVIEW:
Home for the Holidays is a virtual box set/bundle of two books, Mr. Frosty Pants and Mr. Naughty List, that were previously published in 2018 and 2019 respectively, but the bundle was just recently released. Some people prefer to have individual titles on their e-readers or bookshelves (I’m typically one of them), but there are definite advantages to a virtual box set. Primarily, it saves you $$ over buying the books individually, and sometimes the author throws in bonus content too (although that is not the case here. 😞). But it also positions you to read straight through the series without getting distracted or worrying about whether you have all the books or are reading the books in the right order. Basically, instant satisfaction and prime binge reading material. 😉 Sometimes, there are also unexpected effects of the box set “experience” that augments the books, which is what happened for me here.
Both books are holiday stories but they have very different vibes. Home for the Holidays Book #1: Mr. Frosty Pants is very angsty. It has a definite HEA, and we get to see some of our couple, Casey and Joel, after the HEA in Book #2 as well. So it gets you where you want it to; however, it’s not the easiest journey for the MCs or for the reader to get there.
Casey Stevens and Joel Vreeland were childhood best friends, despite being from the proverbial opposite side of the tracks. Casey is from a rich, snobby social climbing family, although Casey tends to see past the money to the heart of people. Casey never looked at Joel as different because of their different stations in life. He just wanted to spend time with him, listen to his band practice and be together. Joel, for his part, was in love with Casey even back then, but his homophobic, abusive father was a very real threat to both Joel and Casey, and Joel suffered the physical consequences of his father’s vile temper and homophobia many times. There’s a Romeo and Juliet-esq tragic quality to Casey and Joel’s childhood relationship: neither knows the other is gay or in love with the other, interfering, manipulative parents stand ready to exact very real consequences on them for being together, and lack of communication between them causes their relationship to sever in a very painful way. Fast forward 3 ½ years and Casey, who has been away at school in New York, returns for the holidays and defiantly shrugs off the whole “You can never go home again” mantra. He is determined to not only return to his hometown and to Joel and remember how it was before, but to also make it better in the present. Joel, for his part, has really been dealt a terrible hand in life and he is buckling under the pressure. He’s locked his feelings away and is terrified of letting anyone, especially Casey, back in.
Mr. Frosty Pants is a story of forgiveness, acceptance and hope. There’s a lot of pain each of them have to work through, and, to be honest, it wasn’t the easiest to really attach to or feel invested in either of them right away. The author did such a good job of creating Joel’s “Frosty Pants” aura, that I had trouble warming up to him. In early parts of the book, Casey came across as pushy and sanctimonious, imposing his therapist’s views on Joel and examining things like his internalized self loathing about his home. There are a number of reveals that occur over the course of the story which helped shift my viewpoint, but it really took me about half of the book to feel invested in Casey and Joel as a couple.
I had a similar issue with Mr. Naughty List. In contrast to Mr. Frosty Pants, Mr. Naughty List is less angsty and more sexy and spicy. There’s a D/s aspect to this book (with a lot of spanking), but there’s also a love story threading through all of the super-hot sex scenes. The family dynamics involved in this story are unusual as well and are a core part of the story. RJ Swift, musician and mutual friend of Casey and Joel, is ½ of our couple in this story. RJ is introduced to us in Mr. Frosty Pants, but you don’t need to have read that one first. (However, you have the box set with this one so it makes it easy to do so! 🙂) The other ½ of our couple is Aaron Danvers, a teacher – in fact, he’s RJ’s former English teacher, who RJ had a huge crush on in high school. RJ still harbors a strong attraction for Mr. Danvers/Aaron years later when they meet up again at the beginning of this book.
It really took me a while to get invested in this storyline. I liked RJ immediately, and felt his world-weary loneliness due to traveling constantly performing with bands, and his perceived isolation from his mother and her “new” family with his stepfather and stepsisters. I did not, however, attach to Aaron in the early parts of the book. It took a while before his struggle with his identity, his sexuality and his belief that he is unworthy of love really began to clearly translate and enable me to develop an emotional attachment. I’d say about ¼ way into the book, things started to click and the complexity of the emotions and struggles of RJ and Aaron really hit home, and then I felt invested in seeing them together, happy and in love. In retrospect, this story is deceptively sex-focused, when in fact, it’s so much more complex than that. But I didn’t find that it was written in a way that grabbed me from the outset. My feeling here, as with Mr. Frosty Pants, is that both the characters, and the reader, need to have patience and perseverance to get to the ultimate, rewarding conclusion.
Overall, I’d say this is one of those, perhaps odd, cases where the box set definitely augmented the stories, even though the content is exactly the same as the two books separately. It’s a result of the experience of reading them together: If rating them separately, I’d have given both books 3 ½ Hearts. But because of the box set experience, I had both books at the ready, I continued right from Mr. Frosty Pants into Mr. Naughty List, which I might not have done otherwise, and the continuous flow from one to the other gave both stories momentum and made them feel more complete. Because of that, I’m giving the bundle 4 Hearts and recommend you read both books, in sequence, as I did.
RATING: 
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