By: Maricarmen Estudillo

It’s the most readable time of the year!

Ahhh winter the season to travel without the frost bite, to add a dash of peppermint to an otherwise traditional love tale, to rediscover the holiday spirt without the credit card guilt. A time when mistletoes are mere excuses to fall in love within the pages of a great book.  Start the fire, prepare el pan dulce! Its time for my top 5 winter reads!

1.What Light by Jay Asher  

My Take: Christmas scrooges beware! This book will melt your heart into a gooey marshmallow on hot cocoa. It was sweet, romantic, witty and soooooo Christmas. A story filled with candy cane stir sticks, snow and the ache of first love. Cue the mistletoe!  A short and sweet winter contemporary, you’ll want to snuggle down with. 

“Sierra’s family runs a Christmas tree farm in Oregon—it’s a bucolic setting for a girl to grow up in, except that every year, they pack up and move to California to set up their Christmas tree lot for the season. So Sierra lives two lives: her life in Oregon and her life at Christmas. And leaving one always means missing the other. 

Until this particular Christmas, when Sierra meets Caleb, and one life eclipses the other.” – What Light

2. Let It Snow by John Green, Maureen Johnson and Lauren Myracle

My Take: Wowza, that the word. Firstly the name John Green just screams “this one is going to be great” and it really was. A collection of three interwoven stories for those extra holiday heart flutters. There are laughs, kisses with strangers, teacup pigs and other holiday … er… twists? A total must read!

“A Christmas Eve snowstorm transforms one small town into a romantic haven, the kind you see only in movies. Well, kinda. After all, a cold and wet hike from a stranded train through the middle of nowhere would not normally end with a delicious kiss from a charming stranger. And no one would think that a trip to the Waffle House through four feet of snow would lead to love with an old friend. Or that the way back to true love begins with a painfully early morning shift at Starbucks.” – Let It Snow

3. Dash And Lily’s Book Of Dares by Racheal Cohn & David Levithan

My Take: Oh how I laughed. Get this; boy, dry humor, user of all words big and complicated and hates Christmas. And girl; loves Christmas, daring, and full of hope, then boom! Crash! Their worlds mesh together through a notebook. Laugh out loud funny and as fluffy as the first snow fall.

“Lily has left a red notebook full of challenges on her favorite bookstore shelf, waiting for just the right guy to come along and accept its dares. Dash, in a bad mood during the holidays, happens to be the first guy to pick up the notebook and rise to its challenges. What follows is a whirlwind romance as Dash and Lily trade dares, dreams, and desires in the notebook they pass back and forth at locations all across New York City…” –Dash and Lilly’s Book of Dares

4. Anna and the French Kiss by Stephanie Perkins

My Take: I’ll start off by saying this is not a holiday read, but it feels like it. Paris, prestigious boarding school, a beautifully charming boy and did I mention Paris? This is the contemporary that got me into contemporary reading, yes it’s that good! Once you fall in love with Stephanie Perkins’ writing style, you can continue to follows Anna’s story in “Lola and the Boy Next Door” and “Isla and the Happily Ever After” which are also part of these series, but are different stories with new characters, while keeping the old, but new, but updated… get it? I knew you would.

“Anna can’t wait for her senior year in Atlanta, where she has a good job, a loyal best friend, and a crush on the verge of becoming more. So she’s not too thrilled when her father unexpectedly ships her off to boarding school in Paris – until she meets Etienne St. Clair, the perfect boy. The only problem? He’s taken, and Anna might be, too, if anything comes of her crush back home. Will a year of romantic near-misses end in the French kiss Anna awaits?” – Anna and the French Kiss

5. If I Stay by Gayle Forman 

My Take:  Not to be mistaken in any way with its motion picture, please don’t judge this book by its movie. I remember being in a book funk when I found this one sitting casually calling out “read me, read me” from my coworkers desk. Because I was in a book funk and desperate I started to sneak listen to this one audio style, and wow I was hooked and shocked and in love and frustrated and to sum it up I had…ALL THE FEELS. Again not a holiday read but most definitely one that must be read (or listened to) fireside-wise. The writing is beautiful, the twists and turns and holds you heart hostage and let me not get started on the cello music.., Ugh I can’t even.  

“In the blink of an eye everything changes. Seventeen ­year-old Mia has no memory of the accident; she can only recall what happened afterwards, watching her own damaged body being taken from the wreck. Little by little she struggles to put together the pieces- to figure out what she has lost, what she has left, and the very difficult choice she must make.” – If I Stay

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