Harriet gets herself into a situation trying to help her teenage famous five in her role in pastoral care. She ends up getting arrested and doing a deal with the local devil who owns a theatre and is using her to fix it up. It all snowballs and various groups join using the community space.
A brilliant,, funny and heartwarming journey where Harriet finds herself some friends and maybe some romance along the way.
Loved this book.

A perfect Christmas afternoon can be lost with this Christmas tale - adored it! Jenny Bayliss has a particular skill with writing Xmas fiction - long may it last.

Gosh, I blooming love Jenny Bayliss books and always look forward to reading them. I was super excited, and I was definitely not disappointed.
Harriet works in pastoral care and takes it very seriously to the point that it takes over her life. So, when she spots one of her charges bunking off school and walking into an abandoned building, she follows him and then promptly gets arrested.
What follows is just fabulous and I loved every second of it.
This book embodies everything I love in not just a Christmas book but in a book in general. All the community spirit, different walks of life, banding together to help lift each other up. An overwhelmed character that needs to make a change and a little sprinking of romance just to tie it all together.
I even tabbed a section that made me think differently, and I rarely do that!

Loved this festive storyline. Found the characters enticing and the background stories. Really enjoyed this book looking gout for other titles by the author

I loved this book. It's so festive and heartwarming, with a storyline containing real substance.
The central character is Harriet, a pastoral leader in a school. Through no fault of her own, Harriet finds herself with a massive project to restore a local historical theatre and put on a one-off performance of A Christmas Carol. Added in to the mix is that she has to do all this with five of her most challenging students.
Harriet is one of those flawed, superwoman characters, and extremely likeable.
I also liked the insight into Dickens' motivation for writing A Christmas Carol (my favourite Christmas story).
A brilliant read!

This is another wonderfully festive book by Jenny Bayliss that is full of heart and community spirit!
When Harriet is cornered into organising a festive extravaganza at the dilapidated Winter theatre she goes far above and beyond to bring together so many disparate community groups to make it work and so much more too! She finds ways to help and foster understanding between many disparate groups so they not only start working together but also learn tolerance for each other’s foibles also.
This was so much more than just another festive story, it was a feast for the soul imparting a wish for understanding, tolerance and cooperation and perhaps for a return of the community spirit of old!

This is a wonderful, heartwarming seasonal story. There is more substance to it than many Christmas novels, as we follow Harriet’s endeavours with a group of challenging students from school, and a rundown empty theatre. Entwined with this is a possible new relationship which questions her independence. I loved this book and strongly recommend it. It will melt the hardest heart in the run up to Christmas.

What a joy this book was, its like a warming hug of Christmas Spirit.
Harriet's daughter is spending the festive season in New York, Harriet is excited for her adventures but can't help feeling lost, her cup of joy this Christmas is definitely not overflowing.
She finds herself drowning her sorrows in a bar, flirting with a handsome guy who she ends up going home with, not her usual behaviour so when morning comes around she escapes before he gets out of the shower.
She loves her job but after some of her students break into a dilapidated Theatre she ends up covering for them and getting herself into trouble with the Police. The lawyer of the owner is non other than hot one night stand guy, they both end up thrown working together when the owner requests she directs the Theatre's final show for Christmas.
This was just a joy to read, I loved Harriet's relationship with the kids, the support and encouragement she gave them was so heart-warming.
Thank you NetGalley, Jenny Bayliss and Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House for this ARC, all opinions expressed are my own.

I just loved this book, it was so good and it made me long for Christmas. I just loved the story of this book, it has great characters as well and it’s good to read about young people and older people getting on and learning from each other as well as helping each other out. It’s just such a heartwarming read.

I would highly recommend reading this book if you love a good a Christmas with a heartwarming story.

I would like to thank Penguin and NetGalley for giving me the opportunity to read and review this book early.

A sweet community based Christmas spirit book that follows a teaching assistant that tries to help out struggling pupils and ends up cleaning up a dilapidated theatre in the village and putting on a Christmas play. There's some fantastic characters and the feel good factor of intergenerational friendships as well as the romance factor. There were a few features that made it lose a star for me as personally I don't know two grown adults who avoid all swear words even in the midst of very stressful situations and use words like "bullocks" instead, I get swearing in novels is controversial and my complaint probably adds to the "can't win" dilemma for authors, but I'm afraid this repeated dialogue from all the adults involved in the whole book just got very challenging to read. All in all it's a cosy, uplifting and festive read and perfectly suited for readers that can't handle any swearing whatsoever.

This book was a wonderful, Christmassy read and i really enjoyed everything about it!

Kiss Me At Christmas had a stream of amazing and quirky characters but I really did love Harriet, she was wonderful!

This Christmassy novel oozes with community spirit and has the found family trope, which I really enjoyed.

This was a wonderful book that held my attention right from the very beginning and didn’t let me go until i had very quickly turned all the pages and come to the end.

I thoroughly enjoyed this festive, heartwarming story that was so warm and cosy too…..

A wonderfully festive read. I loved the characters and how the story starts, it is an unusual setting. Both warm and cosy this is a veritable hug in Christmas story bliss. I really enjoyed it and spent a wonderful weekend reading it.

Kiss Me at Christmas is a heartwarming found-family story that seamlessly weaves together a diverse cast of characters and an engaging narrative about love and friendship. I found myself particularly captivated by the secondary characters, and I appreciated the thoughtful exploration of individuals with challenging backgrounds and lives. The Christmas atmosphere is beautifully infused throughout the book, and I loved how conflicts were consistently resolved through meaningful communication.

The book is a medium-paced read, offering a refreshing departure from the typical Christmas romance. One aspect I truly valued was having protagonists who aren’t the usual young characters seen in the genre; instead, they come with rich, complex family lives that remain joyful and uplifting. Since the story begins in November, it feels more like a winter or holiday-themed book rather than being solely focused on Christmas, making it a perfect choice to pick up earlier in the season rather than waiting until the end of December.

While I would have liked more time spent exploring Harriet as a character alone and her relationship with her daughter in greater depth, the overall story worked well for me.

I highly recommend this book to fans of theatre and stories centered on chosen family.

Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin Random House for the advance review copy. I never miss a Jenny Bayliss novel, and it’s a pleasure to read her work a bit earlier in the season.

The blurb on Net Galley for Kiss Me at Christmas by Jenny Bayliss reads as though it were written for an entirely different book. There are glimmers of recognition but they are small. When I downloaded it, it was atributed to an different author too.

The novel itself is fairly standard Christmas fare. It's not earth-shattering but it was enjoyable. I found the extremes of Harriet's job and boss hard to believe in, but James, the male lead, was well-drawn.

Cute and cosy Christmas romance that will be great to re-read in winter. The book explores a variety of themes and I’d definitely recommend adding to your TBR

Really enjoyed this book. Left me all glowy and wishing it was Christmas! Could totally relate to all of the characters and loved the community spirit. Thanks for a great nights read!

Absolutely loved it. Read in one sitting in our tent. Could not stop. . I loved the story of Harriet with her worry of an empty nest and how she moved on. She was one hell of a teacher . The way the old theatre came back to life was brilliant. . James sounded very handsome. I loved the Christmas element and helping the community. and all the food parts . Just read , escape and enjoy.. My favourite Christmas book of 2024 so far and read a few. Just read it.

Unfortunately this book just wasn’t for me. I couldn’t relate to main character Harriet and found the book missing something. Which is a shame as I was looking forward to reading this one.

I found this book a little slow to start with and just expected it to be another Christmas romance but it was absolutely fantastic. Yes the story had romance but also so much more and explored lots of different themes while having the magic of Christmas running through it
The characters were brilliant and I could really imagine being there in the theatre with them all.
Harriet was my favourite by far and I loved how the romance between her and James played out.
The ending had me in tears but it was a perfect.
Thanks to Netgalley, Jenny Baylis and Michael Joseph, Penguin Random House for an advance copy in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.