I will start off and say that I’m sorry that I didn’t really enjoy this as much as I thought I would when I first requested this as an ARC. I won’t lie I had waited and waited to read this until I was like okay it’s time.. and with that I felt like I was forcing myself to read it. I felt like there wasn’t much that kept me interested. I will say I’m completely on board with the fact that our main character loves woman. To me this isn’t on par of a holiday romance, even though it would seem like one cause of the time of the year it takes place in. I didn’t fall in love with the characters at all. This is a sapphic romance. All in all thank you to NetGalley for this ARC in exchange for an honest review.

Fern Falls felt like it'd be a magical place to live: snowy, quirky, and pleasantly progressive for such a small town. The charming setting was definitely my favourite part about this book.

Unfortunately, the rest of In the Event of Love was underwhelming as the one-dimensional characters and romance left much to be desired. The little chemistry Morgan and Rachel had felt more physical than romantic so I was never particularly interested in their relationship.

There are a few sad sub-plots that don’t really go anywhere and plenty of sex scenes that felt like filler. I wish some (or most, really) of that energy had gone to fleshing the characters out and creating a spark between them.

The epilogue was cute and I enjoyed it up until the unexpected twist, which I imagine will be quite divisive among fans.

While it wasn't my cup of tea, In the Event of Love was a cute and fun read that I know a lot of people are going to love this winter/holiday season. This was a debut novel so I look forward to seeing how the author improves over the length of their career, and I’ll be picking up their future books.

I received this book through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. ARC provided by Kensington Books.

With her career as a Los Angeles event planner imploding after a tabloid blowup, Morgan Ross is not headed home for the holidays so much as in strategic retreat. Breathtaking mountain vistas, quirky townsfolk, and charming small businesses aside, her hometown of Fern Falls is built of one heartbreak on top of another.

Take her one-time best friend turned crush, Rachel Reed. The memory of their perfect, doomed first kiss is still fresh as new-fallen snow. Way fresher than the freezing mud Morgan ends up sprawled in on her very first day back, only to be hauled out via Rachel’s sexy new lumberjane muscles acquired from running her family tree farm.

When Morgan discovers that the Reeds’ struggling tree farm is the only thing standing between Fern Falls and corporate greed destroying the whole town’s livelihood, she decides she can put heartbreak aside to save the farm by planning her best fundraiser yet. She has all the inspiration for a spectacular event: delicious vanilla lattes, acoustic guitars under majestic pines, a cozy barn surrounded by brilliant stars. But she and Rachel will not have a heartwarming holiday happy ending. That would be as unprofessional as it is unlikely. Right?

This book was really a queer Hallmark holiday movie for better or worse. I really need the Hallmark movie now. This book was perfectly wintry with a little bit of holiday magic. I loved how things unfolded in this story. Everything felt natural and believable with a little bit of that rom com magic. Kae did an amazing job at making you feel as if you were in Fern Falls, with beautiful descriptions and details as she shows you around town. The story conflict makes you root for these people, and it's fun to see them all come together to pull off the fundraiser. Another thing I really adored was the entire friendship group, and how supportive they all were. It was super cool to see some of their old traditions still being there, and how Morgan got be a part of it once again. It was also interesting to reflect on career vs relationships and what we think we want. I especially loved Ben and Adam, and I can’t wait to read more about their story (cannot wait to read their story in book two). I would definitely recommend checking this one out if you want to read a quick and sweet sapphic holiday rom com!

This was a very whimsical, fantastical holiday read. I almost gave up around halfway through the book but stuck it out. This will be a hit for lovers of Hallmark, but I felt it was a bit lacking in terms of character dialogue and the fact that we casually just skipped over these two MCs sharing vulnerable information as they fell in love to just skip to more and more chapters about sex. The ending was a bit unrealistic and felt very rushed to me, but I did root for the characters and appreciated Morgan's development through the book.

Also sounds like there will be a sequel for Adam and Ben, I am VERY much looking forward to that one!

Book Synopsis:
With her career as a Los Angeles event planner imploding after a tabloid blowup, Morgan Ross isn’t headed home for the holidays so much as in strategic retreat. Breathtaking mountain vistas, quirky townsfolk, and charming small businesses aside, her hometown of Fern Falls is built of one heartbreak on top of another . . .

Take her one-time best friend turned crush, Rachel Reed. The memory of their perfect, doomed first kiss is still fresh as new-fallen snow. Way fresher than the freezing mud Morgan ends up sprawled in on her very first day back, only to be hauled out via Rachel’s sexy new lumberjane muscles acquired from running her family tree farm.

When Morgan discovers that the Reeds’ struggling tree farm is the only thing standing between Fern Falls and corporate greed destroying the whole town’s livelihood, she decides she can put heartbreak aside to save the farm by planning her best fundraiser yet. She has all the inspiration for a spectacular event: delicious vanilla lattes, acoustic guitars under majestic pines, a cozy barn surrounded by brilliant stars. But she and Rachel will ABSOLUTELY NOT have a heartwarming holiday happy ending. That would be as unprofessional as it is unlikely. Right?

gosh, this one was so cute and soft and fluffy. i love sapphics, they really are god's gift to humanity.
rachel and morgan were so cute, true soulmates! i loved the friend group in this book and I'm in desperate need of adam and ben's book!!
finally, a sapphic holiday romance with not too much angst and a lot of spice!

i’m extremely busy at the moment, so i don’t have much time to read arcs but i will come back and edit this with my actual review once i’ve read it! super excited!

Okay okay okay Courtney Kae! This is my first book by her. Loved the spicy old lovers vibe. I love a book where they go back home. Brings me all the Hallmark vibes. Holiday season on top of that. I was ready for a blanket and a cup of hot cocoa. Thanks for this ARC.

If you like Hallmark movies - you’ll like this book. It was a little slow to get started, but once I got into it, it was delightful. The relationships between the characters were heartwarming (romantic and platonic), and it was an easy, fun read.

It’s cheesy at times…but like, Hallmark cheesy. And I think that’s fun.

I received an electronic ARC in exchange for my honest review.

I would watch more holiday Hallmark movies if they included sapphic romances with open door steaminess. Courtney Kae's "In the Event of Love" got me in all my fall/winter holiday feels and I am ready for sweater weather, y'all.

Tropes:
Friends to Lovers
Second Chance
Small Town
Queer/Sapphic - bisexual female MCs
Found family

I'm sure I'm missing something but be sure that it had it a lot and it was all so delightfully done. It had some drama and conflict but really this book was about Morgan re-finding herself, what and who makes her truly happy and figuring out that she is enough, in and of herself.

Morgan heads home to her small town to weather the storm that drunk shenanigans wrought on her work life. Having avoided the drama of friends and family for years, she realizes that she won't be able to hide anymore. She figures out that she doesn't want to hide anymore. She falls in love with Fern Falls and all it's wonderful quirkiness, she connects with family again and the flames of first love are reignited.

It's a fun, completely light and easy read to help usher in the chillier weather. I'd like to book a getaway at the B&B please!!

After a major bump in her event planning career, Morgan Ross has just returned home to her small, wintery hometown of Fern Falls—the town she’s been avoiding for years. In order to save her job and try to get the promotion she’s been dreaming of, she takes on the task of saving the businesses in town—including the tree farm belonging to the girl she’s always loved and can’t seem to get over—by throwing a festival to raise money before they're replaced by an outlet mall.

But as she and her ex, Rachel, work together to plan the event, they discover the things they’d left unsaid years ago could be the key to kindling the feelings they’ve both kept buried since Morgan left. They decide to give each other—and themselves—a second chance.

This book was basically a queer Hallmark Christmas story… if Hallmark Christmas stories were steamy! It was adorable and heartwarming. Fern Falls was charming, and the side characters stole my heart. I love grand gestures with grand speeches, and this book had a great one! It was so cute—a perfect holiday (holiGay!) read!

Oh, my heart, I loved this book! In the Event of Love is the outstanding debut novel by Courtney Kae. It’s a small-town, wintery, second chance queer romcom. When Morgan Ross gets swept up in a scandal, her boss sends Morgan back home to her childhood mountain town. Run-ins with old friends and flames make her first few days home a bit rocky. As truths surface, and old wounds mend, Morgan rekindles friendships and sparks fly with the one that got away.

“Sometimes mistakes are the start of something wonderful.”

If you love heartwarming Hallmark movies where small town residents battle corporate greed, you’ll love In the Event of Love! Courtney Kae wrote a beautiful, spicy LGBTQ+ love story with endearing characters in a dreamy ski town. Morgan and Rachel are lifelong besties who missed their first chance at love. But if they can open their hearts to forgiveness, they just might make it work the second time around. Courtney Kae’s zany & endearing characters add heaps of fun and charm to the sweet story.

Where are my Hallmark holiday movie fans at???

I know, it’s basically the start of spooky season, but my spooky vibes begin and end at Disney’s Hocus Pocus. And you know what? I think I’ve really been sleeping on reading holiday romances year round.

We’ve got a fantastically trope-y premise: big city event planner Morgan is sent to her hometown for a forced vacation after some bad press. Her high school best friend / crush Rachel has a family Christmas tree farm that needs saving. The two have been estranged since an end of high school falling out. Do we all know where this is going? It is exactly as joyful, swoony, and steamy as you could hope.

I divided my time between the ebook and audiobook for this one, and Melissa Moran’s narration was spot on! Thank you to @netgalley and #HoliGays22 for my ARC & thank you to @tantoraudio for my ALC! I really enjoyed this one.

DNF at 33%. Couldn’t care less about any of the wet blanket characters or the whoa is me MC returning to her home town to try to save her career. Literally NOTHING exciting took place in the entire first 1/3 of the book. The dynamic between the two female MCs felt so forced and unrealistic that it would ever be able to turn romantic. Decided to quit while I was ahead. Not the book for me.

YES! YES! YES! YES! YES! A Hallmark-style romance with bite, heart, and just the right about of steam. I absolutely devoured this book and can't wait for more!

I really enjoyed this book. It was steamy and fun. The blend of small-town charm, romance, heat and heart read smoothly and was easy to get into.

there were so many great things about this book. it had lovable characters, was very wholesome, and i loved the queer representation

unfortunately, it did fall flat for me in a couple areas. while the writing as a whole was alright, there were certain lines that made me cringe so hard i had to put my phone down (for example, reading the line “my sweet girl came like a legend” made me shudder). i felt like there were one too many pop culture references and the word “growl” was used far too often. there actually was quite a bit of repetition like that, which definitely drew me out of the story. sometimes the dialogue and plot felt really unrealistic, and to be completely honest, Morgan was a VERY frustrating protagonist to follow.

overall i think it just came down to personal preference. however, i do appreciate the tropes (second chance romance, small town etc) and the queer representation

In the event of Love is a sapphic holiday romance that feels like a Hallmark Christmas movie... with some added spice (if ya know what I mean lol).

The story follows Morgan, who after a scandal at her event planning job in L.A. returns home to Fern Falls. where she runs into Rachel, her former friend, and crush. They don't have the best history, but when Morgan discovers Rachel's Christmas Tree Farm is in danger of being bought out she decides to truly test her skills to try and save the farm.... and maybe win Rachel over. Morgan and Rachel have fantastic chemistry during the story and really seem to grow and work through things together. My only complaint is the romance part of it felt very very rushed.

2.75 Stars. I’m sorry to say but overall this was disappointing. It was okay at times, but other times I had to force myself to keep reading. I have been so happy and supportive of mainstream publishers finally catching up with LGBTQ+ books, and for my personal tastes sapphic books, these past few years. It has been wonderful to see and I was really excited about this read (Kingston is a smaller publisher but distributed by Penguin) since I like sappy Hallmark stories, and dream of watching a day full of gay stories, and not just the rare LGBTQ+ Hallmark story here or there. But as excited as I was to see the book blurb shout-out names like McQuiston and Bellefleur, I’m sorry to say this book didn’t live up to that type of hype. While mainstream is working on catching up, I’ve read dozens of sapphic holiday romance books by self-published and small sapphic publishing houses so I have to compare this book to them all, and while it does okay, it just doesn’t really hold up like I had hoped. But who knows, just because this is not my dream “halmark” holiday read, doesn’t mean it won’t be for someone else.

I purposely waited as long as I could to read this so it would be closer to the holidays and hopefully I would be more in the mood. I didn’t think early July and 90 degree weather was going to work for this book. This summer has been so brutal that even imagining snow has been a hard task. I’m glad I waited as it was easier to get into the book but still, I really struggled with this read. It took me a whole week to finish and this was not a long book. It was average size for a romance and I just kept picking it up and putting it back down. It wasn’t anything bad or awful, it was just that there was nothing to grab me and to keep me reading. I have paint by numbers app, on my phone, that is great for when my mind is racing and my anxiety is bothering me a bit, it’s so peaceful that I love it. I can’t tell you how many times I went to pick up the book and instead I thought oh I’ll just paint a few pictures and just skip reading the book and after that it started to feel like a chore to actually read this.

I love first person, I’m a big fan, but plain romances, were there is no mystery or big fantasy adventure or anything else, is not the best for first person. Not really getting to know anything about the other love interest really limits us readers and we just don’t know what to feel about the other character. In this case we think she was pretty great, but we don’t know enough about her to know for sure so we mostly feel bad for her and we end up thinking the main character doesn’t deserve her, well at least I did. The main character was in first so you do know her pretty well, but it doesn’t mean you like what you know. I also didn’t feel much of a connection between the mains so I’m a bit worried about their relationship as a whole.

This is getting long already so I don’t really want to go into how much sap actually formed on top of the sap already there, like the ending was sappiness to the extreme. Plus add in the whole dead mom part and the evil almost mom thing and eh it just got really super corny/eye roll maximus at the end. And the worst part of the whole book, IMHO, was the EPILOGUE. I actually didn’t even realize what it was at first and I thought it was a sneak peek for the next book in the series. That’s how much it doesn’t fit into the book and just stands out so oddly. The book didn’t need an epilogue at all and it was forced and felt weird. In seven years of reviewing, this is only the second time I have ever had to complain about a book epilogue.

TLDR: There was some potential here but I cannot recommend this holiday romance. The setting was cute, but it was hard to form a first person connection with a character I did not care for. While I wanted to believe in the couple, I could not feel the sparks between this sapphic couple with lines like “It’s convenient for me that I can’t get a visible boner, because everything you do turns me on.” This was not the “hallmark” romance I was looking for but I hope others might enjoy this one more than I did.

An ARC was given to me for a honest review.

In the Event of Love is described as having the makings of a hallmark movie and it did. For instance, the meddling of a secondary character in the main characters’ matchmaking, and corporate zealots wanting to invest in the small town for their agenda.

I enjoyed the author’s humour and wit which was mostly reflected in the inner dialogues and playful banter. The whole cast was a delight to read, from their quirks, strengths, and weaknesses, but most importantly, their camaraderie. The characters were so likable that I even managed to like a character that was only mentioned briefly. I was touched by the sense of community that Kae was able to convey across the pages.

The romance between the main characters was sweet and their chemistry together was undeniably steamy.
Even though it mostly felt like a rom-com, I was deeply affected by the descriptions of a character’s grief or heartbreak. These scenes were written well and it made me want to give them a warm hug (and I’m not much of a hugger).

This is kind of like a sapphic Hallmark movie, and that's pretty awesome. It was cozy, funny and sweet. It wasn't without faults, but it had the right vibe for sure!