Review: Alexandria Bellefleur's The Fiancée Farce.

Thanks to the publisher & Netgalley for the complimentary e-ARC. All opinions provided are my own.

Talk about serendipitous…Tansy Adams’ lie about having a fake girlfriend for the last 6 months could blow up in front of her face. Instead, the very woman she’s been pretending to date—Gemma West, a romance novel cover model—walks into the wedding reception & agrees with Tansy‘s story.

But Gemma also wants to take their unexpected ruse even farther. She wants a marriage of convenience with Tansy so that she can satisfy the terms of her grandmother’s will & take over his media company.

So now it’s a marriage of convenience between two women with some unexpectedly similar trauma from their childhoods, some similar ambitions when it comes to saving their family legacies, & some similar attraction for their “fake” partner turned real the more they spend time together.

Alexandria Bellefleur’s The Fiancée Farce is really cute & the things that work for me really work for me. Like the mental health rep—this might be the only book I’ve read where the book talks about mixing mental health meds & alcohol?

And though the relationship in this book moves really quickly at the beginning, by the middle & end I felt caught up & more settled in the feelings I could see were growing. Adorable text message exchanges & words + actions giving proof to how protective they are of each other really won me over.

What works less for me are how some things feels glossed over or jumped over a bit, including the aforementioned beginning & a family bit at the end, & a truly unsettling villain who as far as I’m concerned deserved a far worse fate than what he got.

I kind of wavered a bit on the ranking because the beginning is more like a 4 for me, & the middle toward end is more like 4.5. So how about 4.25? ;).

Either way, this one is really sweet, but not too sweet (let’s not forget the dirty talk), with a lovely story of people finding out a marriage of convenience that turns into more is possible in & out of romance novels.

4.25⭐️. Out 04/18. 

CWs: Previous death of father. References to familial loneliness and scenes of familial antagonism. A lead is called a “whore.” In high school, Tansy was seduced and intimate photographs of her were shared with classmates, leading to harassment; the same person who did this is a secondary character who continues to appear in this book, often “leering” & making crude comments.

[ID: Jess, a white woman wearing a black & white striped shirt & coral skirt, holds the ebook & three pink tulips in front of a green tree.]