Review - - Christmas at the Ranch

Christmas at the Ranch

by Julia McKay

Publisher: G.P. Putnam's Sons

Release Date: September 23, 2025

Reviewed by Nancy

She hasn’t been in love in ten years, but she’s about to get back in the saddle.

With the holidays around the corner and her father recently imprisoned for financial fraud, disgraced journalist Emory Oakes doesn’t know where to turn. She’s only certain of one thing: She needs to get away.

Fate takes the wheel, leaving her stranded in snowy Evergreen, the picturesque town where she spent her happiest Christmas as a teen — and chronicled every moment in her journal as she fell in love with handsome local, Tate Wilder, at his family’s idyllic horse ranch — until it all went wrong.

Emory isn’t ready to face Tate, but kismet and Christmas magic have other ideas. As the love they’ve denied for a decade rekindles, the betrayals that kept them apart resurface, as does Emory’s family scandal. Yet Tate Wilder and his ranch feel more like home than anywhere ever has. Will Emory and Tate’s alchemy fizzle or will their Christmas wishes come true?

 

Nancy’s Thoughts: 

Christmas at the Ranch is a delightful second-chance holiday romance about two engaging people. I enjoyed the story very much, but I had some problems with the book’s structure. 

I’ll save the structural issues for last and start with the setup and the characters. Emory is easy to root for. In her wealthy, society-oriented family, she often felt like a changeling, so she makes her living as a freelance journalist and doesn’t touch her large trust fund. The scandal of her father’s arrest, however, tanks her journalism career. That and family pressure related to the scandal cause her to flee. She’s well on her way to Evergreen when she realizes where she’s headed. 

Her failed romance with Tate Wilder a decade previously makes Evergreen a less attractive refuge than it might’ve been, but she has nowhere else to go. She figures she doesn’t have to see him. A combination of unfortunate circumstances, however, traps her at the Wilder ranch, where Tate’s father insists she stay in Tate’s house, which is empty because he’s away at a trade show. 

Of course, Tate returns early, and their reunion is beyond awkward. He doesn’t seem to hold any ill will from their long-ago past, though. He and Emory reconnect over the Wilder horses, but the past is always a stumbling block, and Emory attributes any withdrawal on his part to unpleasant memories of the past coming between them. That’s not always the case, though. 

Tate is courteous and friendly. There are lovely, emotional moments where he and Emory connect again, even though they both retreat afterward. Their shared love of the ranch’s horses and Emory’s pleasure in riding again help bring them together. He’s responsible, kind, and concerned that Emory not leave town until she has somewhere to go. 

The book is written in first person, present tense, so we have only Emory’s viewpoint and excerpts from the diary she kept ten years before. The present-tense form is not a favorite of mine, but I’m aware many readers enjoy it. 

My main problem with the story is in its use of the diary. The book opens with a diary entry from ten years previously that tells us how Emory and Tate met. As a prologue, this works. This entry, like all the others is beautifully written. This one shows us the immediate attraction between Tate and Emory in a believable way. The action then skips ten years to Emory’s family scandal. Flashbacks in the form of lengthy diary entries are interspersed in the story. Every one of them stops the forward action and, for me, slows the pace. 

Despite all this looking backward, we don’t know until nearly the end of the book exactly what happened between Emory and Tate that has her so sure he would never want to try again. Emory obviously remembers what happened, and we spend the entire book in her point of view. Yet that information isn’t shared until late in the story. If I had known what happened between them, I would’ve been more sympathetic to her qualms and more inclined to share them. 

Emory refers a couple of times to a book by the author bell hooks, who does not capitalize her name. Because I had never heard of her, seeing the name made me wonder each time whether the book was about hooks for bells. I couldn’t figure it out until I resorted to a Web search. I’m not quibbling with hooks’s choice about capitalization, but I do question McKay’s choice to use the name in a novel where readers might not be familiar with it and so might be stopped by it, as I was. 

The resolution to the romance was satisfying and also tied up some of Emory’s longstanding family issues as she dealt with her father’s scandal. The descriptions of small-town life and of trail rides in the snowy woods were very well done. Aside from the diary flashbacks, the story moved at a good pace. The townspeople had distinct, varied personalities, and the hesitation some of them felt about Emory’s return was believably grounded in her father’s actions years before. And Tate and Emily had me rooting for them from the beginning. 

Overall, as I said, I enjoyed the story a lot. I highly recommend it.

~Nancy