47 pages • 1 hour read
Tessa BaileyWreck the Halls: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Authorial Context: Tessa Bailey
Tessa Bailey is an American romance novelist. She has published over 40 novels and is well-known for her romance series. Her series include the Vine Mess Series, the Bellinger Sisters Series, the Hot and Hammered Series, the Broke and Beautiful Series, the Romancing the Clarksons Series, the Made In Jersey Series, the Crossing the Line Series, and the Line of Duty Series, among many others. Bailey has also published numerous standalone romance titles, including Unfixable, Baiting the Maid of Honor, Off Base, Captivated, My Killer Vacation, and Happenstance. Most recently, Bailey made her foray into the subgenre of sports romance with the 2024 publications of her new sports rom-com duology Fangirl, Down and The Au Pair Affair.
Bailey was born and raised in Carlsbad, California. She has studied at both Pace University and Kingsborough Community College. She made her literary debut in 2013 with the publication of Protecting What’s His, the first installment in Bailey’s Line of Duty Series. Bailey has since won numerous industry awards and accolades. Her novels Fix Her Up, It Happened One Summer, and Hook, Line, and Sinker received starred reviews from Publishers’ Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. Entertainment Weekly also dubbed her the “Michelangelo of dirty talk” (“About Me.” Tessa Bailey). Bailey’s novels feature heated romantic and sexual relationships between unlikely characters and happy endings. Bailey has an extensive TikTok following, where she interacts with her fans and readers. Bailey is known for her “stubborn, fictional blue-collar men and loyal, lovable heroines” (“About Me”). She currently lives on Long Island.
Genre Context: Contemporary Romance
Wreck the Halls is a work of contemporary romantic fiction. Originally published in 2023, the novel falls into the holiday romance subgenre and uses the Christmas season as the primary narrative backdrop. In holiday rom-coms like Wreck the Halls, the Christmas festivities evoke a cheery, bustling narrative atmosphere. However, the impending holiday also augments the narrative tension as the characters rush to resolve family dramas and orchestrate holiday affairs in time.
As a contemporary romance, Wreck the Halls employs tropes characteristic of the genre. These tropes include the Forced Proximity trope, the Friends to Lovers trope, the Holiday Romance trope, and the Love at First Sight trope. In Wreck the Halls, protagonists Melody Gallard and Beat Dawkins develop immediate feelings for each other when they meet in 2009 at 16 years old. Years later, they’re forced to spend two weeks in one another’s company when they sign Applause Network’s “Wreck the Halls” contract and agree to work together to reunite their former rockstar mothers, Trina Gallard and Octavia Gallard, before Christmas Eve. They develop an intense friendship throughout their time working on “Wreck the Halls” and ultimately become sexually involved.
These romance tropes establish a familiar narrative scaffolding while simultaneously inspiring the novel’s primary narrative conflicts, stakes, and themes. The novel also abides by romance genre conventions in that it offers the main characters a happy, redemptive ending. The novel is in conversation with other contemporary holiday romance novels, including Jasmine Guillory’s Royal Holiday, Maggie Knox’s The Holiday Swap, Mary Kay Andrews’s The Santa Suit, and Lyssa Kay Adams’s A Very Merry Bromance.
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