Synopsis (Taken from Goodreads.com):
Would you rather play it safe in the friend zone, or risk it all with a modern marriage of convenience
Noah and Mia have always been best friends, and their friendship is the most important thing to them. Life is going great for Noah and he’s up for a promotion in a job he loves. But Mia’s life is on hold as she awaits a kidney transplant. She’s stuck in a dead-end job and, never wanting to be a burden, has sworn off all romance. So when the chance of a lifetime comes to go back to school and pursue her dream, it’s especially painful to pass up. She can’t quit her job or she’ll lose the medical insurance she so desperately needs.
To support her, Noah suggests they get married-in name only-so she can study full-time and still keep the insurance. It’s a risk to both of them, with jobs, health and hearts on the line, and they’ll need to convince suspicious coworkers and nosy roommates that they’re the real deal. But if they can let go of all the baggage holding them back, they might realize that they would rather be together forever.
Publication Date: 8.26.2022
Pages: 320
Goodreads Rating: 4.38/5 Stars (as of 8.3.2022)
My Rating: 1/5 Stars
SPOILERS BELOW
This book carried great set-ups, but the execution and payoff was lacking. At least, that was the conclusion I came to at the end. On one hand, the synopsis carries many story promises and emotional conflicts. On the other hand, the story failed to engage with those story promises. While the structure of a standard romance novel was present, the story was missing the emotional tension and engagement that truly makes a contemporary romance fun to read.
Mia and Noah both were standard romance characters. Outside of the character archetype, they both carried interests or careers that I haven’t seen in contemporary romance before. Noah was an architect, while Mia wanted to go back to school to be a pediatric dietitian. I did find it to be a missed opportunity that the narrative didn’t engage with those topics more; this story would have been a great place to teach the reader some interesting facts about those careers and it would have deepened the characterization of the two leads.
If there is one thing to know about me as a reader, it’s that I am focused on embellishing details. I am a reader who needs a fair showing of setting/imagery details, and any other details that strengthen characterization. In the case of this story, there was a missed opportunity when it came to embellishing details. We had Noah, who had a hobby of rock climbing and mountain climbing. There was Mia, who was suffering from kidney disease. I found myself craving more details about both topics. I wanted to feel just how difficult it was to scale a mountain while rock climbing; I wanted to know specifics about Mia’s disease, how awful the transplantation system is in the US, and how she was handling her condition emotionally. (There were other details I found myself wanting to engage more with, like their backstories and other relationship conflicts the two had in their lives. Everything felt skipped over or brushed under the rug once it had been acknowledged.) With the lack of details came a lack of connection to the characters and the problems they were juggling.
Trope wise, this story carried a collection of them. As always, I did enjoy seeing the angle of “the guy falls first” (which was later rejected by Mia, who claimed she had always been in love with him too? The detail consistency was an issue in this narrative), even though the romance was insta-lovey. I mean, by the 12% mark both characters were commenting on the attraction they were having toward each other. Other tropes included: just one bed, friends-to-lovers, and miscommunication.
Outside of the character development weaknesses, the plot was another story element I struggled with. Earlier on in this review, I stated that there were many set-ups but poor execution, and I do believe that to be true. We had set-ups for: Mia’s kidney disease, Mia’s estrangement from her parents, insurance fraud via marriage of convenience, Noah struggling with the death of his brother. Although those are only a few of the set-ups, none of them had satisfying payoffs. And a large part of that was due to the miscommunication trope. Noah and Mia hid things from each other, but they never had a prolonged or intense or angry falling-out over any of those issues. It truly felt like the characters and plots were going through the motions without ever doing the emotional work to develop the story.
This is a smaller note, but this novel carried too many time jumps considering the page length. At one point, nearly every other chapter was a time jump. Not only was that disorienting as a reader—as there were often no details pointing to the time of year—but it was a disservice to the character and plot development. The joy of a romance novel comes from experiencing the slow burn or seeing how the characters fight the chemistry (and their internal belief system) before giving in to the romantic relationship. This book could have leapt off the page if a slow burn was at work.
Overall, this was a surface-level story. With every turn of the page, the characters skimmed along the top of what could have been meaningful character development. Instead, the story carried all of the benchmarks of a contemporary romance without any of the tension or punch that truly makes it gut-wrenching and breathtaking to read.
Thank you to Harlequin Trade Publishing, MIRA, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book.
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