a cute, soft, and heartwarming read

Kara wants a fresh start, and she decides to open a cat cafe with her best friend, but since there are aspects where they are hesitant, in comes Ben, who lends a helping hand to their business. When Kara and Ben meet and start working together, it's obvious that there is a spark between them.
This is a wonderful story to read during the holiday season with a cat and some hot chocolate.

thanks netgalley for the e-arc!! :)

Our two main characters, Kara and Ben, start off on the wrong foot with each other when they meet outside of the cat cafe that Kara owns with her best friend. He is the marketing genius who works for the company hired by the little town to boost tourism, she is the veterinarian that works diligently on caring for the cats in the cafe until they are adopted. Her cafe is barely staying afloat and Ben is full of delightfully festive ideas to help bring in the money and the adoptions.

Through the course of the story they work through their pasts, work together for the good of the cafe and spread Christmas cheer as well.

If you love cats, Christmas and cafes this book is right up your alley! If you love Hallmark type cheesy romance, then add to cart! This wasn't my favorite read of the Christmas genre but it was cute and festive!

Over All Rating: ⭐⭐⭐.5

This was a very adorable holiday romcom that will 100% get you in the mood for scarves and peppermint mocha drinks.

Kara is part-owner of a cat cafe and Ben works for a marketing firm. Kara is running away from an undeserved reputation and Ben is running from the biggest heartbreak of his life. Their first meeting is rough, but I’m trying to save the cat cafe, they work it out.

This was really sweet and simple. Perfect for a cozy afternoon at home.

A Cat Café Christmas

A Cat Café Christmas (eARC) — 4.5 ⭐️

𝐏𝐮𝐛𝐥𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐞: October 4th

𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐟 𝐃𝐞𝐬𝐜𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧: Meow and Furrever Cat Café needs a Christmas miracle to stay afloat until the new year, and part-owner and vet, Kara Ingalls, is out of ideas. Soon after Ben Reese writes a marketing piece for the non-profit, business starts picking up. With the help of Ben, Kara starts believing in her dreams for the cat café again. After awhile, their relationship starts blurring the lines between professional friends and romantic interest, but can they set aside their differences and trauma to make it work?

𝐑𝐞𝐯𝐢𝐞𝐰: A Cat Café Christmas is the perfect romantic Christmas book for lovers of cats and Hallmark movies! I couldn’t stop reading it and ended up finishing it in two days! It took a lot of convincing for me not to jump into my car, visit a cat café, and adopt all the homeless cats after finishing the story.

𝐖𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐈 𝐥𝐢𝐤𝐞𝐝 —
😻 Book about Cats
🖤 Diverse Characters
🥰 Feel-Good Story
🔐 Closed Door Romance (Mostly)
🎄Christmas Related

𝐑𝐞𝐚𝐝 𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐛𝐨𝐨𝐤 𝐢𝐟 —
🐈 Your perfect date involves visiting a cat café
📱 You’re not on social media
🩺 You want to be a veterinarian
👗 You’d rather wear a Christmas sweater than a party dress
🥧 Your mom’s apple pie is your favorite dessert

𝐓𝐖: infidelity, strained family relationships

Thank you, NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Publishing), for providing me an eARC copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

Kara and Ben meet and it’s a case of dislike at first sight. Each has previous traumas in relationships that make them very hesitant about romance. I think if this book was about half the length it is, with some severe editing, it may flow better. As it is, it’s just a slug to get through. The little kitten Chaos was a cutie pie.

It’s a clean holiday romance.

Thank you to the publisher for the ARC.

So I’m not a cat person but I loved this book and could see the attraction to cats after! The story was totally awesome. I love the attraction between the two main characters but more importantly I enjoyed watching each of them heal through the trauma of their life. I loved the headers of each chapter with the cats. This was an absolute treat of a book!

This was certainly a cute holiday romance! I really enjoyed all of the cat bios to start of each chapter. I also liked that both characters had interesting backstories that played a role in their budding relationship.

There was nothing that I particularly disliked about this book but there was also nothing that made this one stand out against others that I have recently read which is why I rated it 3 stars.

I would still recommend this for anyone looking for a lighthearted and cute holiday romance, especially if that person is a cat lover!

OMG this book hits you in all the feels! I so looked forward to returning to it at the end of the day. I may have even cried a little.

Kara Ingalls' life had recently taken a dark turn and she went off the grid from social media, burying herself in she and her BFF's new business, Meow and Furever Cat Cafe, serving up delicious coffee and pastries and playtime with adoptable kittles. Kara has sworn off the male species and is content to live her life with her kitties. Until she runs into Ben. nearly literally. Ben, too, has left the dating pool due to his own set of unfortunate circumstances. Hoping to start over far from Boston in California, he and Kara take the usual rom-com route of fighting and disliking each other. However, fate continues to intervene and the two come together on multiple occasions and realize they really like each other.

Is this a darling romance that has some strong elements of fiction? Yes? Would it be right at home on the Hallmark Channel? Also yes (and also I would DEFINITELY WATCH). Did that stop my enjoyment of it? Absolutely not. You will laugh, you will cry and you will feel joy for the kitties whose lives are saved. This is one I would read again.

If you prefer a smuttier romance, this ain't it, y'all.

If you can make do with a few clichés and many many cute cats, this is the story for you.

I personally prefer reverse grumpy sunshine, e.g. A ​Court of Silver Flames, Take a Hint, Dani Brown and Well Matched, but I suppose I can make do with what's given.

Kara and Ben are both sad souls for very different reasons.

Kara's last boyfriend stole her customer information from work and profited on their donations. She is implicated. Running away from that life, she now runs a cat café with her best friend Charity.

Ben's fiancée left him for his brother. Does this actually happen to people? I could never imagine dating anyone that had previously dated one of my siblings.

The best part of this book are the snippets about adoptable cats at the beginning of each chapter.

I'm a romance reader who is also a cat lover and I have 20 years experience working in the veterinary field and feline rescue, so I had high hopes for this book.

It delivers on the cat/veterinary front. The depictions of the rescue world and veterinary medicine are accurate, the author doesn't gloss over the difficult parts or sugar coat it. I also loved the opposites attract romance between Kara and Ben. They're both interesting characters with complex lives. I also liked the side characters.

The place where the book lost me though is the writing. It's weak and repetitive. The dialogue often feels forced. The author isn't trusting the reader to remember things so they're brought up over and over.

If you love cats and Christmas and aren't a stickler for great writing, you'll probably enjoy this one.

It always seems weird to me to when I'm reading Christmas stories in October. But that's the game reviewers have to play. Happily, I love all things Christmas so I've gotten over it.

Since I do love all things Christmas I couldn't wait to read A Cat Cafe Christmas. It also didn't hurt that I'm a cat lover. The funny thing is that my cat is all black. She's more of a Halloween kitty than Christmas.

I enjoy Codi Gary and haven't read her in a while so I grabbed this up when I saw the arc become available and I'm so happy I did. It turned out to be a sweet holiday read. Perfect to warm your heart for the holidays. I loved the friendships that both the main characters shared with their friends. They each really needed someone to be in their corners when life knocked them down.

And believe me when I say they have both been knocked down.

You'll love Ben. He is the sweetest, nicest guy you'll ever meet. He is still so sad about what happened to him and is having trouble dealing with it. I don't blame him at all. I will say that I wouldn't be as forgiving as him.

Kara's past will also make you want to hurt someone. She's gone through a lot for most of her life and thankfully had some key people in her life that have made it possible for her to become the person she has. She's so nice even when others aren't to her. I love how much she cares for the kitties in her charge and the way she moves from one story to the next without finishing the prior one.

There is so much more I'd love to talk to you all about but I don't want to ruin the story for you. You really need to experience it for yourself. I will say that if I was Ben I would have made people pay a little bit more before forgiveness. But that's just me. What can I say, I can be mean.

A Cat Cafe Christmas is the perfect story to read and you are sitting by your tree and relaxing after a busy day. There are a few characters that I really liked and I can't wait for them to have their stories told.

This is a fun holiday book! I loved Kara and Charity's business with coffee and cats! Ben also was a character I liked and seeing their evolution of challenges and successes with the Cat Cafe was great! This is a 5 star read for me for a holiday romance! It also hits just the right time for me as I celebrate the gotcha day of our 2 family cats that we were lucky to get from a local rescue 1 year ago!

I actually found this one quite difficult to get into for some reason, but it is undoubtedly a cute, cosy, Christmassy romance. If you like cats, this is definitely the book for you! My favourite scenes were with Ben and little Chaos the kitten. I also really enjoyed watching the two characters overcome the traumas in their past and learn to believe in love again.

This book was such a let-down. It had so many things I usually love in romance: cats, Christmas, angst. And some parts of it were great -- I loved the kitten Chaos, I liked how Ben started as not a cat guy until Chaos won him over, I liked that Kara was a vet at a cat cafe that tried to find furever homes for lots of kitties. Like I said: it had so many of the elements that usually make me fall heads over heels in love with a romance novel.

Unfortunately, it just didn't work for me. I'm tapping out and DNF-ing at 71%. The story dragged, the characters lacked chemistry, and the jumble of subplots never quite gelled together for me. There was a lot going on, but the slow pace and lackluster romance bored me, and as cute as the cats were, I didn't really care enough to slog through the remainder of the book.

First, the characters. Kara and Ben were... okay. I liked the meet-cute where Kara was totally turned off by Ben not liking animals -- I totally related, as that would be a turnoff for me as well. But then I honestly didn't understand why she'd guilt him to keep caring for the kitten he found. Especially when Ben was doing renovations around his home, and there were lots of holes for the kitten to fall through, and dangerous tools for the kitten to hurt himself on. I'm glad that it worked out (because of course, plot), and that cat-fearing Ben eventually falls for the little guy he calls Chaos, but I still felt it was an irresponsible move on Kara's part to entrust the kitten's care to someone who'd stated he didn't want it. I wish there had been more of a reason why Ben had to take the kitten in, beyond just cute flirty banter.

Beyond that, I like that each character had a tragic backstory that explained why they were gun-shy about starting a new relationship. Kara's ex is in jail for embezzling from Kara's former workplace (thus implicating her), and is about to be released. Ben's ex dumped him for his brother, and he's all angsty about his mom's attempts to heal the rift by Christmas. The thing is, while both backstories made sense, they also dragged far longer than they should have. Part of it is that very little actually happens in both subplots. Ben's brother shows up at one point, and Ben's mom does a whole guilt trip thing, but Ben himself actually undergoes very little emotional change on the matter. As for Kara, I can understand why she'd be scared to open a letter from her ex, but that also meant that for most of the book, the ex remained a weird shadowy threat like some boogeyman rather than an actual character.

The subplot about saving the cat cafe from bankruptcy had promise. But again, both characters got in the way of me really investing in that storyline. I can understand Kara's reluctance to be on social media because of her ex, but her resistance to any marketing efforts is just counterproductive. And Ben's insistence on Kara's story as the perfect marketing hook makes sense only for plot purposes; there are plenty of ways to promote the cafe and increase revenue without putting one of the owners in the spotlight, and if Ben was as good at his job as he's supposed to be, he should have focused on those instead. Heck, even focus on the backstory of Kara's business partner Charity. Even though she wasn't the main character, she was a much more compelling one to me, and certainly didn't seem shy about being in the spotlight.

The other main snag for me was the romance itself. I didn't really feel the chemistry between Kara and Ben, and apart from the hate-at-first-sight meet-cute, their will they/won't they dynamic barely had any tension. There was a random hallway kiss that barely had any heat, lots of conversations that felt more like info dumps than actual story progression, and some arguments/break-ups that felt more perfunctory than actual obstacles.

The deal breaker for me, I think, was their whole "let's not date, but we can't call ourselves friends because friends don't kiss" thing. Yeah, sure. And the idea of being each other's "healbound" (like rebound but with healing -- gag me) is just... ugh. I'm totally up for cheese in romance, but this is just middle school levels of avoidance. Like, okay, we get it, you like each other but can't actually be adults about it yet, because plot.

As for what worked... the cats were cute. I liked the little profiles of adoptable cats that began each chapter. And I thought the Twelve Days of Catmas idea was adorable -- if this were ever turned into a Hallmark movie, I can imagine that part of the plot would take center stage. (It was very much in the background of this novel though, with random reminders of each Catmas day deal sprinkled in. Which was a shame.)

I also loved the MCs' best friends Charity and Schwartz. They're both hilarious, and I love their chemistry. I wish their romance had been a more prominent part of this novel, but perhaps Charity, at least, will get her own novel.

Overall, this novel was a disappointment. Though admittedly I came into it with super high hopes given it had so many of the elements I love in romances. 2 stars minus 1 for how much of a letdown it was, but plus 1 for the cat cafe and cute cats.

+

Thank you to Forever for an e-galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Thanks to NetGalley and Forever (Grand Central Publishing) for the advanced reader copy.

This week’s headline? Cats aren’t only for Christmas

Why this book? Cats

Which book format? ARC

Primary reading environment? Train rides

Any preconceived notions? I think there’s going to be lots of cats (there better be)

Identify most with? All the cats

Three little words? “biscuit-eating leprechaun”

Goes well with? Cats, of course

Recommend this to? Cat lovers, enemies to lovers lovers

Other cultural accompaniments: https://www.adoptapet.com/?gclid=Cj0KCQjw-fmZBhDtARIsAH6H8qjs1jdTe1hUsjMVFkFSomB5Isg3xKO3kkpdAB1GdO0OWOoLIh7FkwQaAotmEALw_wcB&gclsrc=aw.ds

Grade: 2.5/5

I leave you with this: “Kara strongly believed that there were two kinds of cat people, ones who were born loving cats and those that fell in love after meeting the right cat.”

📚📚📚

Listen, as if it wasn’t obvious enough, my entire interest in reading this is because of cats. I wanted to read about the adorable, floofy bébés and smile so much that my cheeks hurt. And I did. For the cats. The book itself isn’t bad but there’s this thing that certain authors do when it comes to enemies to lovers that I don’t particularly care for. It’s having one character hate the other for the most ridiculous reason ever. I get some people (ahem, characters) are quick to judge but it just gets my goat when it happens on the page.

I wasn’t enamored with Kara and Ben. I didn't care about if they got together or not. And there were quite a number of “he’s so tall,” variations that I rolled my eyes at. Another thing I could do without - I wouldn’t say it’s straight up miscommunication with these two, it’s refusing to communicate or purposefully misunderstanding. Regardless, I still think this is a cute rom com to read (once) around the holiday season.

A Cat Café Christmas is available now.

I love cats, I support rescuing cats (and other animals!) and finding them safe, loving homes, and I really wanted to love this book, but, I didn't. The cats were definitely a highlight and the premise of the book was fine but the characters just felt like they were pretty negative people and a bit quick to judge. I really didn't like how the FMC, Kara, basically bullied people into fostering and/or adopting cats, and I especially disliked how someone could walk into the cat cafe and an hour later, walk out with a cat, no questions asked. IRL, every rescue organization I am aware of and have adopted from require references, and interview, and sometimes even a home visit, to ensure that the adopter is ready to adopt and will provide a loving home. This book could have been a great way to promote adopting rescue animals if it had approached adoption in a loving, responsible manner.

Putting all that aside and focusing on the romance aspect, now. I just didn't feel like Kara and Ben were both mature enough and had dealt with what happened in their pasts to be ready to enter into a new relationship. MC Ben came across as bitter and cold, letting his anger with his brother fully consume him. He then came across as a misogynistic jerk at the friendsgiving dinner. FMC Kara said that she didn't feel like she fit in with her best friend's friend group, but she didn't do anything to get to know them and for them to get to know her. She came across as very passive, but then complained when things didn't go her way.

Overall, got stars for the cats and the story premise, but otherwise, it was a meh book for me.

I received an eARC from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

Kara Igalls needed a new start and she found that by opening up Meow and Furrever Cat Cafe with her best friend. She didn't expect to be so much in the hole by the first Christmas. If she doesn't fix this issue quick, there will be no more Cat Cafe. Then the most unlikely answer comes to help. Insert Ben Reese. He's a marketing guru... who hates cats!?! Even though he doesn't love animals, Kara needs to take any help she can get. She has to get out of the red and find home for the ever-growing list of cats for adoption. Maybe if they stay professional and focus on the cats, they can accomplish this mission. Or can they? Stay professional, that is.

I honestly adored this very opposites attract charmer. I liked that both Ben and Kara had a troubled past, but they slowly realized that their past doesn't have to define their entire future. The best part though were all the cats! Let's be honest, anytime a cat is involved, they steal the show.

This was SO FUN! Kara and Ben are a prime example of enemies to lovers. I loved how relatable their inner monologues were and their chemistry!

A perfect read for the holiday season 🥰

Thank you to @netgalley and Grand Central Publishing for my e ARC in exchange for an honest review.

I am a cat owner myself so I jumped at the chance to read this holiday cat themed romance.

Overall I give it 3 1/2 stars.

It was very Hallmark-esque in tone with regards to Ben being a marketer who could help save Kara's cat cafe. I did like the dilemma that Ben faced with regards to his family and I also liked his general attitude towards the situation. I felt it was overall very realistic and mature. I didn't like how "insta-lovey" it seemed once he met Kara. To be honest I felt like the romance was moving a bit fast, in particular for a guy under his circumstances, but whatever.

Kara was a lukewarm character there were times when I felt that she was not very likeable, however I did like that the other characters called her out on it, in particular towards the end. I loved the little cat blurbs at the beginning of each chapter, I felt that was a very cute creative way to keep the reader informed of the different cats at the cafe.

The ending seemed a bit much, with the airport and what not, but honestly I guess that is what you come to expect from these holiday themed rom-coms. I will say I will read from this author again in particular if she writes a sequel regarding how Charity and Schwartz's Mexican vacation went.

3 stars!

Loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooots of cat talk and cat puns, so be prepared. This book is sweet, perhaps a little *too* sweet, in my opinion, meaning not only does it have a saccharine ending, but it's closed-door and has barely any cussing. Things get resolved so fast that Kara, the main female character, doesn't really have the proper time to work through her glaringly huge trust issues. And Ben's trust issues go away too quickly! I hated that the people in his life were basically trying to gaslight him into coming home for Christmas despite everything that went on between him and his brother. COME ON. Let the dude heal already and leave him alone! I like how Kara selflessly and tirelessly work to help save cats, but it's silly that she was willing to let her business almost get run into the ground because she didn't want to promote her business due to her past. I like that Ben eventually becomes a cat person when he finds *his cat,* I know exactly how that is! When you find your soulmate animal, you know. All in all, it's a cute book, but not one I'd recommend to everyone.

Thank you to NetGalley, Codi Gary, Forever (Grand Central Publishing), and Forever for providing me with an ARC copy of this book! All opinions are my own, and I was not compensated for my review.