Single Dad's Wife: A Fake Marriage Romance by Lara SwannMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was given an opportunity to review an Advanced Reader’s Copy of this book at no cost, in return for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Nathan is a single dad to a gorgeous 3 year old girl. He’s a doctor and owns his own family practice in a small town in Connecticut. One of his best employees is Jessica, another doctor, who is slightly younger, who has been with the practice for 3 years and does much of the business admin side of things as well as being a doctor. She’s essential to the running of the practice, especially with Nathan having his daughter. His ex-wife left when his daughter was 8 months old and never came back. Now she’s back and suing for full custody.
Nathan’s lawyer tells him that having a wife in the picture would make it much more likely that the custody hearing would go in his favour and after several weeks of visitation etc not going well, he is determined to do something drastic and asks Jessica to marry him in exchange for a full partnership in his practice.
The ‘Fake Relationship’ trope is one that I actually enjoy. I don’t know why, but it appeals to me for people to be forced together for some reason and find out they actually like each other a lot. This version was done very well. The build up to the actual decision made the idea seem reasonable (which is often hard to do). I liked both Nathan and Jessica. They are both really nice people and genuinely care about their patients, their family and their friends. They both go into the arrangement with their eyes wide open and with the best of intentions.
The build up to their real relationship was gradually and carefully done. It wasn’t instant and it wasn’t perfect. I liked that everything wasn’t plain sailing with their relationship or their situation. It made it feel more real. In fact, that is one of the things I liked about this book. The characters and their situation felt real. It felt like ordinary people got into an extraordinary situation for the best of reasons. When things went wrong there wasn’t any lashing out. There wasn’t weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth, they behaved like grown ups even when things weren’t going well.
If Nathan and Jessica were real people I’d love to call them my friends, because they really are interesting and nice characters. This may not be the dramatic, dire circumstances, all or nothing alpha romance that is popular, but this is the kind of romance that leaves you feeling good about people and that cannot be underestimated in a book.
Borrow Free With Kindle Unlimited
Buy From Amazon UK
Buy From Amazon US
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases, made after using the above links.
No comments:
Post a Comment