Sixteen-year-old Finley Brown is certainly as bright as an LED bulb on high, but her first semester at Barrington—an elite Connecticut boarding school—hasn’t gone so well.
Maybe it’s because of her small-town Oklahoma sensibilities. Maybe it’s the fact that everyone at Barrington is incredibly smart and expected to perform at a super high level. Or maybe it’s having to rub elbows with other teens like Arthur Chakrabarti Watercress, a stiff, snooty guy from a wealthy British Indian family who always seems on the verge of mocking everything Finley does. Whatever it is, her grades are only so-so, she has no real friends, and she feels like a total failure.
So Finley decides to just fly home to Christmas, Oklahoma, for the holidays. At least it’s comfortably familiar back in that broken-down, quirky, holiday-themed burg. She’ll work a bit at her grandmother’s small inn and then just disappear into her room as Christmas passes in Christmas.
But when Finley arrives home, things aren’t so familiar as she thought. For one thing, her ex-boyfriend Brody and her BFF Mia are now a couple! Not only that, but her former rival Ayisha—the prettiest girl in town—now works at her grandmother’s inn. And her mom and dad might be on the way to the big D—as in divorce.
That, however, isn’t the worst of it. Right after Finley arrives home, Arthur Chakrabarti Watercress and his very British Aunt Esha show up too. It turns out that Arthur and his aunt always jet off to some exotic place for Christmas. And after seeing Finley’s social media posts and pictures about her home town (which might have been just a teeny, tiny bit fabricated) they have come to Christmas for the most incredible Christmas ever!
Of course, when Arthur gets an eyeful of what Christmas, Oklahoma, really looks like—all frozen scrub grass and empty shops in need of a fresh coat of paint—he’s somewhat disappointed. No, he’s furiously disappointed! And he pulls Finley aside to demand that she deliver the Christmas that she promised. Otherwise, things back at school will get a whole lot worse for her.
This could well end up being the biggest disaster of a Christmas in Finley’s short life. Or, like, in the history of man.
Of course … it also might be the Christmas that Finley Brown falls in love.