To be honest, it's been a week and I still don't know what to write, because the book was so good I wish for everybody to experience it fully blind.

Incredible descriptions, rounded characters and dialogue that will make you close the book to stare at the wall for a while. Every word is thought out for maximum impact, every twist of the story coming back to haunt us. It feels almost wrong that this was written 60 years ago as it feels timeless. The story keeps swirling in my head, calling to me and asking that I sit down to digest it.

One of the books I will want to reread over and over and over again in the future, that is for sure.

I went into Three Holidays and a Wedding fully prepared for a cheesy, Hallmark-style romance, and I was fine with that. Predictability and sentimentality were never the problem. What ultimately ruined the book for me was the writing itself, which felt lazy, shallow, and strangely disrespectful to the reader.

The prose is flat, and the dialogue is painfully unnatural, with characters constantly explaining their emotions instead of letting them emerge through action or interaction. There is no trust in the audience to understand subtext; everything is spelt out, repeated, and overexplained. Strangers unload their deepest trauma within minutes of meeting, not because it feels earned, but because the plot demands it.

The characters themselves are largely two-dimensional. Side characters exist solely to push the plot forward and behave inconsistently from scene to scene, while the main characters repeatedly “realise” the same things without any real sense of growth. What makes this even more frustrating is that these are meant to be adults, yet they consistently talk and behave like teenagers. The tropes aren’t the issue, but their execution is half-baked and careless.

What’s most disappointing is that the premise is genuinely strong. The idea of three holidays colliding has real potential, and the opening hints at a warmer, more thoughtful story than the one we actually get. Instead, the novel rushes from point to point without depth, nuance, or emotional weight. In the end, this book isn’t bad because it’s light or cheesy, but because it lacks care, cohesion, and craft — and it left me far more frustrated than entertained.

This was gonna be 5 stars, but then they dropped a wild claim that the ergot fungus was "probably" behind the Salem witch trials, with no sources or reasoning for the assertion? Absolutely wild behavior.

That aside, this book is gorgeous! Katie Scott did a fantastic job with the illustrations - this would be an exceptional coffee table book. This is a good introduction to fungi, more sciency than The Secret Life of Fungi, so would be a good alternative or companion read. This covers fungi biology, diversity, interactions with plants and bugs, and human interaction and utilization.

A quick, gorgeous read that I do recommend, albiet with a bit of side eye. As it is full of illustrations I would not go audiobook, and the ebook my library had was rendered as two print pages per one ebook page; I just zoomed in on the text and it was fine, but print would be ideal for this if you can swing it!