Fake Marriage to her Best Friend, by Kat Cantrell

[sophia_sol]

At first I was just mildly annoyed at this book for things like not doing enough to make me believe the fake marriage was a reasonable idea for the characters in question, and then making the premise less fun by having both characters already into each other before they even get fake married. Also the book opens with the female lead getting a large batch of posters from a printshop with a mis-spelling of her name and I was just like. HOW. Either she provided the design file to the printshop, in which case she made the mistake, or she paid the printshop for design work and did not look at a SINGLE PROOF of the design, so it's also her fault. And then she's mad at the printshop for making the mistake! (I realize this is a niche complaint. But. It's literally how the book opens! It did not start me off on the right foot.) Anyway, I didn't really enjoy the book but I was going to give it a relatively forgiving review.

But then it ends with the aspiring-politician female lead dropping out of politics (which she enjoys and is good at!) for the sake of her man. And now, instead of being like "it's a shallow but well meaning book that doesn't work for me" I'm like "I AM ACTIVELY MAD AT THIS." I actually had to go back and read the end a second time because I didn't believe what I'd read. HOW DARE. Honestly! Well, I guess this is what I get for picking up a book from the Kobo free ebook shelf.

Comments

[china_shop]

But then it ends with the aspiring-politician female lead dropping out of politics (which she enjoys and is good at!) for the sake of her man.

No no no no no.

I actually had to go back and read the end a second time because I didn't believe what I'd read.

Hee! <3

[sophia_sol]

You know, even now, having read the ending twice, I'm half-convinced I must have mis-remembered it because it COULDN'T have ended that way! At any rate I guess I can be pleased with this evidence that mostly I read very reasonable romance novels, if this kind of ordinary sexism is so unbelievable to me....

[conuly]

With a title like that, how could it possibly have gone so very wrong?

[sophia_sol]

Hah, well, the romance genre in general trends in the direction of titles that are very on the nose (I mean, other recent romance novels I've read include the titles "A Marriage of Inconvenience" and "The Convenient Marriage") so on the face of it this title did not seem like a red flag to me! I actually really appreciate that the genre tries to make clear from the titles what tropes to expect from the book, so it's easy to find books with tropes that appeal to the reader.

[cahn]

Lol! But somehow both of those titles are at least a little... I'm not sure what the correct word is, allusive? Like, I don't feel like "The Convenient Marriage" is nearly as pedestrian and in-your-face as "Fake Marriage to her Best Friend." :)

[sophia_sol]

Fair! On the other hand I have in the past read and enjoyed a book called "Manhunting" with a cover that was a pair of heart-patterned boxers on the end of a fishing line. Romance marketing is wild sometimes.

[cahn]

ahahahaha exactly my thought!

[the_rck]

I would believe in someone ordering something and not looking at the proofs. When I was still working at the university library, we had someone donate 400-500 books. He had put 'Gift of' plates in each and every one of them (or had paid someone else to do it) and never noticed that his name was misspelled on each and every one of them. That was around 1999.

It wasn't even a typo that was believable as 'well, maybe he spells his name weirdly.' It was 'Jaun' for 'Juan.'

I don't have much sympathy for him, though, and it was memorable as a vast WTF? moment that made a vast amount of work for us as the library had to cover the plate in every book we kept, even the ones we wouldn't normally put a 'Gift of' plate in. (We only put them into hardcover books. Paperbacks were considered to ephemeral for it and, if not ephemeral, too likely to need rebinding in a short time frame.)

[sophia_sol]

Oh no. OH NO. That's. Really bad.

Now I don't respect the heroine of this novel very much, if she's willing to blame the employee at the print shop for her own unwillingness to look at the proofs that he surely must have sent.

[lokifan]

What! No! WTF.

I'm watching Death Note rn (always up to the minute, me) and at least when a dude FBI agent told his fiancee (and ex-excellent FBI agent herself) she'd get out of the bad habit of investigating when they had children it had the courtesy to a) show her as being right about who the killer is and b) murder him shortly afterwards.

[sophia_sol]

Hah! Yes, that's a much more satisfying way to run with that particular plot point!