Thinking no one is reading, a blogger who calls herself LBH writes about her most personal feelings, especially her overwhelming loneliness. She goes from day to day showing a brave face to the world while inside she longs to know how it would feel if one person cared about her.

Alex Bartlett cares. He’s reading her posts in Daytona Beach, Florida. Nursing his own broken heart and trust issues, he finds himself falling for this sensitive, vulnerable woman whose feelings mirror his own. Following a trail of clues LBH has inadvertently revealed, he discovers that she lives in the small town of Midway, Utah. He makes his way there just after Thanksgiving, determined to find LBH. Maybe she’s a Lisa, Lori, or a Luanne. Instead, he finds a woman named Aria, a waitress at the Mistletoe Diner, who encourages Alex in his search while serving his pie along with some much-needed sympathy and companionship.

Alex finally finds his LBH, a woman who is as beautiful and kind as he imagined she would be. How can he tell her that he knows her secret? What’s holding him back? Could it be his feelings for Aria?

One year after his wife left him, Alex is still bitter over the divorce. Well, maybe not as bitter as he was, but he’s lonely… that’s for sure. His best friends decide it’s time for him to get over the divorce and encourage him to move on and sing up for an online dating site. Alex does, and after his profile is set up he gets the urge to look up loneliness and is directed to a blog by the mysterious LBH. Her posts are all too relatable to Alex, as well as honest and raw. In just a few posts he finds himself falling for her, and then when she announces that she will no longer be blogging, he decides on something even crazier than online dating.

He decides to go find her.

This is the third in Evans’s Mistletoe collection, which are all stand alone books but with a common theme (and one book mentions another in it). The first difference of this book from the others is that the main character is a male, which for me, was a refreshing perspective. At first there’s a good pacing to the story, but at the end it seems a little rushed to be believable. Though that could just be me.

My favorite thing about this story is the theme of life taking you in an unexpected direction. Alex spends time looking for this LBH in a small town (after doing some detective work through the blog posts to figure out where LBH lives), but then when he comes across Aria in the town’s diner, his world is flipped upside down. Even some of the side characters have a little anecdote of this kind of thing happening and it’s a very relatable topic. We never know what will happen, especially when we don’t take chances.

Compared to the other books in the Mistletoe collection, this isn’t my favorite. That’s not to say it isn’t a good book – it’s a very easy read and cute throughout. It’s just not my favorite. I still recommend it though if you’re looking for an easy-going Christmas tale!

Rating: 3.5/5 stars