Book Review - F##k It, It’s Christmas by Holly Atwood

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Title: F##k It, It’s Christmas

Author: Holly Atwood

Format reviewed: Ebook

Source: Netgalley

Publisher: Pan

Publication Date: 8th October 2026

Rating: 5 Stars

❄️Is your Christmas to-do list more like a never-ending roll-call of obligations?

🎄Are your fairy lights more tangled than your tights drawer?

🍷And are your homemade mince pies more pie in the sky than reality?

Join the club.

Meet Laurie: a working mother of two who is at the end of her tinsel. All she really wants for Christmas is five minutes of peace (and another Bailey’s in her coffee).

With a disastrously chaotic family Christmas brewing, Laurie has a choice to make. Should she double down on her perfectly manufactured festive cheer? Or burn the Pinterest board and embrace her imperfections so that she can have some fun too?

If you’ve spent more Christmases surviving than thriving, it’s time to join Laurie in ditching the colour-coded spreadsheets, letting the kids (and adults) stay in their pyjamas until 3 p.m. and finally raising a toast to say, ‘F##k it, it’s Christmas’.

A laugh-out-loud novel for fans of Amandaland, The F##k It List and Why Mummy Drinks.

From start to finish this had me giggling, and nodding and empathising and generally loving every single moment of this.

I love books featuring rather hectic mums that think they need to be perfect when instead they are face with the messy reality of life, and in this instance Christmas! 

And Laurie is the master of the motherly internal rant. They were brilliant, and I can imagine women of all ages especially if you have kids, or extended family to stay at Christmas, nodding in total and utter recognition of just about everything Laurie thinks. 

She is wonderful and to say for all of her intentions of planning and having a properly organised Christmas, that nothing goes according to the plan she never had time to prepare.  She is just barely surviving, and her husband doesn't seem to be much help at all. 

Her kids are fun, although like just about any book of this trope, there were a couple of inevitable scenes with far too many bodily fluids for my liking.  And they always seem to occur while I'm reading while eating!! 

I feel like Laurie could be me if I had ever had kids. I loved how her attitude changes over the course of this book, especially towards the big day itself but also towards "Perfect Clara" her sister in law.   

This is easily one of the best books I've read for a while, and should be a must read on festive TBRs for this year.  

Thank you to Pan and Netgalley for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.