I liked Stella’s acceptance of her culpability, and I appreciated that she had been through extensive therapy and regularly uses the lessons from it. This was an interesting and different approach to take to a heroine with mistakes in her past, since often, heroines are expected to be innocent victims or misunderstood. She’s been in a toxic and abusive friendship with her best friend for over a decade, following her into all sorts of increasingly dangerous and illegal activities until the one that put them in jail.

Stella is wrestling not only with the disorientation of returning to life on the outside, but also with the way she got herself there in the first place. The only problem? Stella’s recently been released from prison, where she’d served time for a felony she most definitely committed. Stella Schmidt finds herself stalled outside a department store on New York’s 5th Avenue, hypnotized by the sheer wrongness of the holiday window display: who on earth thought to put mechanical penguins at a luxury department store? The man who notices her reaction turns out to be Aiden Cook, store owner, who pushes her to apply to design the replacement windows.

While it’s not the best example of Bailey’s spicy style, it’s a welcome addition to the generally low-sensuality Christmas subgenre, and it’s nice to see a heroine in need of redemption instead of the hero. Window Shopping is a sexy holiday romance that will most definitely put the jingle in your bells.

Window shopping tessa bailey pages