After a spectacularly bad first date, Elle and Darcy assume they will never see each other again. Then both of them have run ins with family where they are once more quizzed about the failures of their love lives. So Darcy hatches a scheme. What if they agreed to fake a relationship for a few months to prove to their respective families that they were in fact capable of doing more than just failing at their personal lives? Surely that would solve all their problems, they’d be able to get the family off their back for a bit and then they would “break up” and move on with their lives, safe from intrusive romantic questions for the next year or so.
This was a fun one. Faking it ’til you (accidently) make it is a fun twist on the “oh no I have more feelings than I should have” type of romance. When there are no external sources of tension in the story, assuming that you have unrequited feelings when you have previously agreed there will be no feelings is a conceit that I was happy to follow along with. The first in Alexandra Bellefleur’s series following the romantic travails of an overlapping group of Seattleites (I reviewed of Count Your Lucky Stars previously), this one did more for me than it’s sequel. It’s twist on the proceedings means that I felt a bit more invested and understanding of precisely why the miscommunications were happening. The characters had communicated, they had made things clear. And then the messy business of feelings gets in the way.
The warming to each other from their bad start, the reconciling of their differences (Darcy is a cold data driven actuary and Elle is a professional astrologer) had me going to a good 4/5 on the “punching the air and saying ‘girls’ to an empty room” scale, so you know, recommend.
I listened to the audiobook version of this one, narrated by Lauren Sweet and whilst she does a good job with it, be aware if you follow me on that path that there are certainly some exciting moments of non-PG related fun that probably would be advisable to find headphones for, or at the very least ensure that unwary housemates are out of earshot.
