4.5 stars

Whew! This book is heavy. But it’s also hopeful, joyful, and gives a fantastic HEA.

If you’ve been reading this series, you may have been anticipating this book as much as I was. I feel like I’ve been waiting forever to discover the root of the animosity between this couple. As everyone at Four Corners Ranch had their theories about why Landry and Fia could hardly be in the same room together, so did I. Their back story is even more tragic than I had assumed.

There are a lot of things that happen in this book for “romance reasons” and you just have to go with it. From the way Landry ends up in the life of his daughter who was given up for adoption 13 years ago to the way Fia learns of Lila living at King’s Crest with him, on and on. All that being said, this book also does a lot of heavy lifting when it comes to women and girls, their rights, how the world looks at them as opposed to how men and boys are viewed, choices, options, etc., etc. This bit of wisdom from Fia after Landry tells her he feels like an emotional preschooler next to her is a case in point:

“Because the world only demands men ascend to the emotional level of the preschooler, Landry. That’s the problem. So if it seems outrageous to you, it’s only because I don’t thing you realize how much is asked of women.”

BOOM! Mic drop.

Yes, in real life this story wouldn’t be so neat and tidy. That’s not to say there weren’t raw emotions on the page, but through it all I knew there would be a happy ending. I’m still going to say this story is so important in this day and age. It brought me the things I love in my Romance books (love, chemistry, butterflies, happiness) while also discussing important issues without cramming those issues onto the page without thought. It all flows smoothly and plays out organically.

I’m so glad there are more books in this series so I can watch this little family grow in the background of the other stories.

This is a Second Chance Cowboy Christmas Romance, and this is the 9th book in the Four Corners Ranch series. I ended up DNFing this book because the characters drove me crazy. I just did not connect to the characters, and I felt some of the characters did not act their age. I received an ARC of this book. This review is my own honest opinion about the book like all my reviews are.

Title: Hero for the Holidays
By: Maisey Yates
Pub. Date: October 22, 2024

Genre:
Fiction, Women’s, Romance, Westerns

Trigger Warnings:
Family drama, adoption, foster care, trauma, lies, secrets, loss
*I knocked off a star for adult content. Some are just mentions, others are spicier, however, the overall story was too suspenseful to just stop. (Chapters 7, 14, 17, 20, 23)*

Favorite Quotes:
“We were…nothing but broken.”

“It was love. The kind of love that had made a hard decision.”

“Sometimes loving somebody with everything means being willing to let them go.”

Summary/Review:
Laundry King harbors a deep yearning for the child he gave up for adoption—a decision made against his will. He ensures that the adoption agency has his contact information, hoping that when she turns eighteen, she will reach out to him.

Fia Sullivan made the heart-wrenching choice to place her baby for adoption many years ago, a decision she has never been able to forget. At just fifteen, she was too young to care for her daughter, so she found a loving couple to adopt her, trusting that her child would be in good hands.

Now thirteen, Lila has lost everything she once knew and is being shuffled through the foster care system. When her case manager reveals that her biological father wants to connect with her, Lila embarks on an emotional journey in "Hero for the Holidays."

Part of the Four Corners Ranch series, this is my first novel by Maisy Yates, and it stands alone beautifully. The characters are deeply relatable, and the minor characters add rich layers to the family drama. This is a fast paced, tear jerker.

Similar authors to:
Tessa Bailey
Emma Lord
Ali Brady

Thank you Maisey Yates, Harlequin Trade Publishing, and NetGalley for the Advanced Reader Copy for free. I am leaving this review voluntarily.

#HerofortheHolidays
#MaiseyYates
#HarlequinTradePublishing
#reluctantreaderreads
#advancedreadercopies
#NetGalley

It was so nice to come back to Four Corners Ranch and catch up on all the families and their lives. This is Fia and Landry’s story, and it is full of past decisions and regrets, but also with future memories and love. I was so glad to get to read an advance copy of this book from NetGalley and I do recommend it as a really feel good story for the holidays.

Maisey Yates is an author I turn to for complex family dynamics and deeply emotional romance with a western flair. I like some of her books more than others but she’s an author who has never let me down. Her newest novel, a second-chance, lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers story with deep emotional underpinnings just may be my all-time Yates favorite.

Everyone on the Four Corners Ranch knows Fia Sullivan and Landry King can’t stand each other but nobody knows why. Those of us who have been reading this series don’t know why. Hero for the Holidays opens with that reason and, boy howdy, it’s a doozy. What follows is a roller coaster of emotions as Fia, Landry, and Lila navigate the life-changing events that have been thrust upon all three of them.

What I enjoyed most about this book is the evolution of these characters, both individually as well as a family unit. I like how Yates leaves no stone unturned in the development and evolution of Fia and Landry as she guides them through a present-day reflection of the turmoil of their teens, something they had never talked about, helping them forge a new understanding of decisions made at that time through the more mature lens of the people they are today. It’s a gradual process, with ups and downs, as is to be expected when you’ve spent years believing you’re 100% in the right about something only to realize maybe you shoulder some of the blame. Their individual growth paves the way for forgiveness, understanding, and a chance to rekindle an old love in a more balanced, mature, and enduring, though no less fiery, way. These two have chemistry!

Lila offers another layer of emotion, complication, sarcastic humor, and hope as only a young teen whose life has imploded can. She’s authentic, relatable, and has a firm grip on my heart, as she does with Landry, Fia, and the entire King and Sullivan families. She’s the heartbreaking - but ultimately healing - catalyst for the changes that are long overdue in Landry’s and Fia’s lives. I laughed with her, ached for her, loved her. She’s one of my favorite characters of this entire series.

Hero for the Holidays is the ninth book in the Four Corners Ranch series. While several characters and couples from earlier books are featured in this book, Yates has written the story in such a way that it can be enjoyed as a standalone. I’ve read all of the books and it’s fun to catch up with other characters but I don’t think starting with Hero for the Holidays would lessen the emotional impact of Fia’s and Landry’s story. It might, however, make you curious enough to pick up the other eight books.

Hero for the Holidays was such a good book to spend time reading it. This is the first book from the Four Corners Ranch Series I have read. I am going to start with the first and read them all. The characters were go fun to be with.
The main characters got a chance to find each other again. The chemistry between them jumped off the pages and I was anxious for them to figure out what they wanted in their lives.
Maisey Yates is a new author for me, and I am glad I did
Thank you NetGalley, Maisey Yates and Harlequin Trade Publishing for the copy pf Hero for the Holidays. This is my personal review.
Hero for the Holidays was such a good book to spend time reading it. This is the first book from the Four Corners Ranch Series I have read. I am going to start with the first and read them all. The characters were go fun to be with.
The main characters got a chance to find each other again. The chemistry between them jumped off the pages and I was anxious for them to figure out what they wanted in their lives.
Maisey Yates is a new author for me, and I am glad I found her.
Thank you NetGalley, Maisey Yates and Harlequin Trade Publishing for the copy pf Hero for the Holidays. This is my personal review.

With Maisey Yates, you either buy the romance ethos or you don’t; it doesn’t change, which isn’t a criticism, because commonalities are found in every writer’s work. Maybe ethos-exhaustion occurs when a writer is as prolific as Yates? And yet, I enjoy every Yates romance I read, Hero for the Holidays no less than any other. If you enjoy angst, only-one-partner-in-life ethos, internalizing of character repentance and transformation, then Yates will be the author for you; though if you don’t read all her work, who can blame you? Hero for the Holidays, despite its cheery, ranch-y clutch cover is one seriously sad romance, though still ROMANCE; it all works out in the end and, in this case, at least for this reader, in a narratively convincing way. That’s what the genre does, move us to the HEA and we should, in the hands of a good writer, believe it. Before I get into Hero further, the deets from the publisher blurb:

When Landry King shows up at Four Corners Ranch with Lila, the teenage daughter no one ever knew he had, it sets the gossip mill churning. Landry’s daughter has lost her adoptive parents and is in desperate need of a new family. So this Christmas, the untamed cowboy is finally getting the chance to become the father he could never have been when Lila was born. Even if it means dealing with his other biggest regret…

Fia Sullivan hates Landry King. That’s how it’s always been. At least, that’s how it’s been since their dramatic teenage love affair ended in a way that shattered their hearts and left them with wounds that never healed. When Landry dredges up her most agonizing secret, Fia’s devastated…and also overjoyed at the possibility of the new life they could have. But there’s only so long she can be near Landry before their simmering desire reignites. Can they finally overcome their past pain to find new love—and new family—this Christmas?

Yates’s premise is awkward: though they share a business and live ON THE SAME LAND, Landry and Fia never speak to each other, or at least only in the four ranches that work as a business collaboration joint meetings. Yates has to set up Landry and Fia (awful names, BTW) to having stayed apart for thirteen contactless years. Yes, their past is painful: teen lovers from dysfunctional families who found comfort, excitement, and love in each other also found sex…hormones plus amygdala gone wild resulted in an unwanted pregnancy. Landry, who craved family even then, wanted to marry and have their family; Fia, wise, though younger and the one carrying the burden, knew they could not sustain what was an adolescent pipe dream gave their secret baby up for adoption. Now, Lila, their thirteen-year-old daughter, is Landry’s, who gave the adoption agency his name to be reached should his daughter ever wish to. In an act of hurt petty vengeance, he doesn’t tell Fia and when Fia sees her, she realizes who she is because Lila looks exactly like her.

Melodrama, high angst-o-metre and this romance could have gone to hell in a hand-basket of recrimination and sentimentality, but Yates pulls it off because she’s a deft hand at showing character turns: a character thinks and thinks and puts themselves in the other person’s shoes, they weigh and measure and are honest about their own guilty part and they regret and amend. That is the pattern and it works. Because what other genre can say that it is about transformation and promise than romance, derided as it often is?

Moreover, the premise does work well in one particular way: to get Landry and Fia (names are still awful) to talk to each other: to express their hurt, forgive, and enact Yates’s favourite convention. Yates’s couples are meant to be together and, despite the often, but not in this case, explicit intimate scenes, their bodies too are only meant for the other. It’s not quite fated mates, but I do like to think of it like Plato’s idea of a person’s “other half”, so the HEA is a completion of what is “meant to be” for two people.

For Yates, it can only come about with changes of the heart. Fia and Landry have had a time of it, but in their own way stayed true to what they had and to each other (you’ll have to read it to understand). Without spoiling, Yates’s characters are stalled and love, in the form of a child, in the form of a “convenience of civility” for parenting’s sake, in conversation, understanding, and consideration (because you can’t have a romance without good people; they can be flawed, but at core, good), something is set free, something new is born, and what could be more important to a Christmas romance than that?

As with most Yates’s romances, it drags for a bit too long and there’s a mother-daughter (for Fia and her mother) reconciliation that I thought was piling too much icing on the cake, but it doesn’t go beyond a page, one too many at that, but forgivable. Yates’s Hero for the Holidays offers “a mind lively and at ease,” Emma.

Maisey Yates’s Hero for the Holidays is published by Harlequin Books and released yesterday, October 22nd. I received an e-galley from Harlequin Books via Netgalley. The above is an expression of my honest, AI-free opinion.

In the middle of an investigation, the 2 main characters are thrown together to try to lure out the criminal. In the midst of it all they find that their walls have been broken down and discover that maybe HVE is for everyone.

There are lots of emotions in this story stemming from the main characters giving up their baby for adoption as teens (the FMC did it without the MMC's consent). When their daughters adoptive parents die, Landry steps up. He has held so many negative feelings for Fia because of that big decision she made without him, so this dredges up soooo many feelings for him when he has to be involved with Fia and the daughter she gave up. I felt lots of emotions throughout while they worked together to navigate co-parenting a child who loved her adoptive parents and really doesn't care to get to know them (she's really dealing with a lot of grief). The topics were heavy but this was a really good and emotional second chance story. I would recommend it to anyone who loves emotional reads, angst, second chances and family drama-mixed with some cowboy/ranch life.

The past comes back to haunt a couple that loved each other too much as teenagers. The mother allowed adoption of their daughter immediately after the birth. Our hero steps up when their daughter tragically loses her adoptive parents. This is #9 of the Four Corners Ranch series. The characters from the first eight were a distraction to me. I would suggest that readers start at the beginning of the series.

From "love at first sight" this is a book has all the feels. Family comes in many different forms. Some choices are not as simples as one might believe. Fate has a way of showing that no matter the path you end up where you are supposed to be.

Thank you NetGalley and Harlequin for this early read.

Hero for the Holidays (Four Corners Ranch, #9)
by Maisey Yates (Goodreads Author)
F 50x66
Donna Repsher's reviewOct 20, 2024 · edit
it was amazing

Maisey Yates just gets better and better with every new book, and she certainly proved that in this 9th installment of her Four Corners Ranch series. If you've never read any of the books in this series, Hero for the Holidays works just fine as a standalone, but having read the other books in this series would certainly make more clear the relationships with other characters in this novel. For this reader, it more than earned this 5-star rating.

First, a trigger warning. If teen pregnancy and giving up a newborn baby for adoption are issues for you, you may want to pick up a different novel in this series--all of the previous 8 books are excellent reads.

Landry King, aged 16, and Fia Sullivan, age 15, both came from broken and/or troubled homes, and despite that, they fell in love/lust, and were crazy about each other. Their escape from those broken households ended in Fia becoming pregnant, and although Landry wanted her to keep the baby, instead, she left town while 7 months pregnant, found and lived with the family she carefully chose to adopt her baby, and came home, satisfied that she'd found a good, loving home for her baby, and that she'd done what was best for all concerned. To say that Landry had no part in this decision and was enraged by what she had done resulted in 13 years of angry silence between the two--and they lived on neighboring ranches. Landry searched for and eventually found which adoption agency Fia had used, contacted them, and left his name and address just in case his daughter ever wanted to find her birth parents, and 13 years later, his daughter, Lila, finally does contact him--her adoptive parents had died and she had nowhere to go and no one else to go to. Well, Landry still wanted her, and he brings her home, all without telling Fia, with whom he's rarely spoken in the past 13 years.

What follows is one of the most angst-laden, heartfelt and heartwarming, second-chance novels I've read in years, as Landry and then Fia, have their first chance to co-parent their 13-year-old-daughter, who tells them at the outset that she's already had a mom and dad, whom she loved and missed, and she didn't want or need another set of parents.

Lila's presence in their lives, and their love for her, finally forces Landry and Fia to deal with their 13 years of animosity, anger, fear, and sense of betrayal, and that's as much as I'll say since I don't do spoilers, but I will tell you to keep your box of tissues handy, because I certainly had a need for mine. This was a fabulous read and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

I voluntarily read an advance reader copy of this novel. The opinions expressed are my own.

This was a good story overall but I personally would have liked to have seen the storyline focus more on Fia and Landry's romance and relationship than what it did. But that's just my opinion.

However, I did still enjoy reading the book so I'm giving it a 4 out of 5 stars.

One of my favorite parts of Hero for the Holidays was when Fia realized that she still had feelings for Landry after all of the years they were apart along with the scene where they go to pick out a Christmas tree.

These were a couple of my favorite lines/quotes from Hero for the Holidays;

"He had been the boy that her fifteen-year-old heart had raced for, and now he was exactly the man that her twenty-nine-year-old self wanted to climb like a tree."

"But the other problem was that Landry himself was just undeniably hot. His whole cowboy thing had always done stuff to her. That white hat, his tight shirt. His tight jeans."

This is a good book and I think that anyone who loves reading cowboy romances would really enjoy it. And I have several more of Maisey's books on my bookshelf that I look forward to reading eventually. 🙂

4 1/2 STARS!

All of the angsty goodness we always expected from Landry and Fia plus some! Maisey Yates is so good at delivering a hero and heroine that we can believe in time and time again when it comes to her Four Corners Ranch series. The Kings, Sullivans, McClouds and Garretts have laid their hearts out one at a time to find love as they continue to enrich on the partnerships that enriches all of their homesteads. This particular book has been a long time in coming because we have felt the tension between Landry and Fia since the very beginning and just knew there was going to be some turmoil to come. I couldn't have loved their story more!

I highly recommend this book as well as the entire series to anyone who loves a good cowboy romance with strong female leads and family galore as the supporting cast.

HERO FOR THE HOLIDAYS – Maisey Yates
Four Corners Ranch, Book 9
Canary Street Press
ISBN: 978-1-335-00629-5
October 22, 2024
Contemporary Romance

Four Corners Ranch, Oregon – Present Day

As HERO FOR THE HOLIDAYS opens, Landry King is in Portland to pick up his daughter who was adopted at birth. The adoptive parents were killed in an accident, leaving thirteen-year-old Lila in foster care. He plans to adopt Lila and raise her on the Four Corners Ranch, a consortium of four ranches that operates like a town of its own. Lila is soon adjusting, but Landry knows that he will have to address the elephant in the room. While his family accepts that Lila is his, how will they react when it is revealed that Fia Sullivan is her mother? She doesn’t know yet that he has Lila. Then, one day, she happens to show up. There’s no mistaking the red hair that Fia and Lila share. How will the threesome navigate their new life as a family?

Landry and Fia were teen lovers both coming from dysfunctional parents who weren’t there for their children. When she discovered she was pregnant, she knew that she couldn’t keep the baby since she was sixteen. Landry went along with her plans to give the baby up for adoption and that should have been the end of it. It also ended their romance. Through the years, Fia and Landry have tried to avoid each other, which is nearly impossible since they are part of the Four Corners Ranch. When Fia sees Lila for the first time, old emotions bubble to the surface. Love for the child she gave up, and the man she once loved…Landry. Wading through the past and trying to make life comfortable for Lila is of utmost importance. But when Lila isn’t around, Landry and Fia revisit their teen romance and the aftermath of their unplanned pregnancy. Will it lead them to rekindle their romance? Feelings between them certainly haven’t died.

HERO FOR THE HOLIDAYS is that book that will tug at your heartstrings. There is Lila, orphaned after the death of her beloved adoptive parents, and not being wanted by any of their relatives. Landry rescues her from foster care, but he isn’t sure if he is ready to be a dad, though he will force himself. He has a reputation for being tough and surly, but he will do anything for Lila. Fia is the oldest Sullivan sister and has spent the past several years raising her younger siblings after they were abandoned by their parents. She also has been getting their store up and running. She never forgot about the baby she gave up and, in a sense, punished herself. Now she has a second chance to make her daughter happy. There are unresolved feelings between Landry and Fia, which are confronted now that they are forced to spend time together. Will love grow between them once again?

Readers will no doubt be rooting for Landry and Fia to reconnect in HERO FOR THE HOLIDAYS. They are halfway there when Lila indicates she wants her parents to live under the same roof. While readers don’t get to hear Lila’s inner thoughts about it, you know she would be happy to see Landry and Fia marry. Will this happen? Find out the answer by grabbing a copy of this beautiful and emotional tale.

Patti Fischer
Romance Reviews Today

Hero for the Holidays by Maisey Yates: Landry had a daughter. To be correct, he had had a daughter for thirteen years, but now her adoptive parents had been killed and someone had found the note in her file at the adoption agency and they had contacted him. There she was; he was overwhelmed. He took her back to the ranch and introduced her to his family, none of who had any idea. But there were harder introductions before him. Theirs was a unique situation, four ranches, known collectively as the Four Corners, had entered into a partnership wherein they each ran their own ranch but they voted on expenditures to be made and new projects and such. It was the new generation whose parents had all let them down in one way or another. It was working. But this, he wasn’t sure. It was just a matter of time until Fia Sullivan saw Lila and knew who she was. He hated her for what she had done so long ago. But, she had been right: the two of them, at sixteen and seventeen, with horrors for home lives could not have raised this child. She hated him for how he had reacted but there would be a reckoning, very soon.

Fia had taken over management of her father’s ranch at eighteen and made a success of it, differently than anyone had expected, partly because of the collective. She was tenacious and creative and she was making it happen. Landry worked with his brothers on a more traditional ranch but was looking at expanding into other areas which he hoped would produce income. When they had been teens, they had been each other’s refuge. He, from an abusive father, and she from a cheating one and a distraught mother. Their hormones had taken over and that had produced a child. Now, due to a random auto accident they had another chance. This book was so many things, but mainly emotional. They talked to one another and hashed through all they had felt tgeb and felt now. They talked about their daughter. They caused me to stop and think more than once. Well written by Yates, full of feels, full of new beginnings. It was more than a cowboy romance, so much more. Such a unique plot. Good book.

I was invited to read Hero for the Holidays by Harlequin Trade Publishing. All thoughts and opinions are mine. #Netgalley #HarlequinTradePublishing #MaiseyYates #HeroForTheHolidays

Hero for the Holidays by Maisey Yates is the newest of her Four Corners Ranch Series (#9). The novel is full of Kings as we get insight into that part of the Four Corners Ranch. The novel also finally allows us to understand Fia and Landry. Everyone assumed that something happened between Fia and Landry, but no one knew what caused the hatred.

Landry is in the middle of adopting his daughter Lila. Lila was orphaned by her adopted parents and Landry, her biological father, was approached to adopt her. Landry was thrilled and went through all the obstacles. Landry brings Lila home to his family and she is immediately accepted, however gossip being what it is Fia finds out. She is Lila’s biological mother and with some push gets Landry to agree to co-parent with her. Lila is a 13 year old who has a head on her shoulders and seems to want to spend time with both parents. It is through this that the Four Corners Ranch finally learns the secret of the animosity between Fia and Landry.

The novel is a wonderful mix of navigating the past to find the future and serious hotness. Hero for the Holidays allows the joys of parenting to shine while figuring out the everyday. I enjoyed the novel, meeting the Kings, and Lila. Hero for the Holidays by Maisey Yates is a good read.

"Hero for the Holidays" by Maisey Yates is a heartwarming second-chance romance that I absolutely loved. The story of Landry and Fia is filled with emotion, from their painful past to their new beginning. I especially enjoyed the dynamic with Landry’s daughter, Lila, who brought so much warmth to the story. The way Maisey Yates handled grief and healing felt genuine, and the romance never felt forced or cringy. The characters’ interactions were beautifully written, and I was hooked from the start. If you love second-chance romances with heartfelt moments, this one is perfect for the holiday season!

THE BEST BOOK EVER. I loved Fia and Landry so much. THEY ARE EVERYTHING. I love how they found happiness and love again after years. Fia is absolutely a queen. She was always there for her sisters. She was like their mother. When I found out her secret about being mother at younger age, I felt so bad what happened to her. I’m happy she found peace again. I love Fia, Landry and their daughter moments. Giving found family trope and I’m living.

You should absolutely read this book.🩷

Wow. Fia and Landry had a child when they were teens- Lila- who was adopted by another couple. Now tragically, Lila's adoptive parents have been killed and Landry has brought her home. This has a lot of family drama, not only as Landry and Lila navigate their new reality, but also for Fia. And for both of their larger families. You can probably guess how this will turn out but it's a nice journey. Thanks to the publisher for the ARC. For fans of Yates.