Recommendsday: Romances set on reality TV shows

This week’s Recommendsay is another in my occasional series of recommendations based on romance tropes. Well sort of. I’m not sure that reality shows are actually a full on trope, but I’ve read a bunch of them now so I’m claiming it. What most of them have in common is that the hero or heroine is falling in love with someone that they shouldn’t – in the ones on dating shows they’re usually falling for a producer rather than one of the contestants. But I’m not sure what that counts as as a trope – falling for the wrong person maybe? Or forbidden love? Anyway, to the books

I’m starting with the book that sparked the idea for this post – The Love Rematch by Kay Marie*, which came out last week and is currently in Kindle Unlimited. Emily finds herself as the lead on a TV dating show (think the Bachelorette) after her mum goes on breakfast TV begging America to find her daughter a boyfriend. It’s not until she gets to the show that she finds out that one of the producers is Jake, the boy who broke her heart when he left her without a word just as they had finished high school. She’s determined to get revenge on him by showing him how happy she can be without him (and launching her jewellery brand by wearing it on the show) and he’s trying to get a promotion. But it’s a romance novel so of course they’re not as over each other as they think they are. I really enjoyed this – although it took a bit of a surprising turn at the end, which I think needed more time to work out, and the epilogue wasn’t really an epilogue – more of a final chapter just set a year later. But I read it in a couple of days once I really got into it and it was fun. And obviously made me want to write this post!

In One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London, Bea also finds herself as the lead in a dating show, this time not because her mum volunteered her, but because she wrote a blog complaining about the lack of body diversity in dating shows. When i wrote about this three years (!) ago, I said not to go into it expecting at traditional romance, because it’s more complicated than that – for all that it has a happily ever after. But I’m still including it here becuase I think if you read it you would like the Kay Marie, and vice versa.

Not set on a dating show, but on a show that’s basically Bake Off lightly disguised, Rosaline Palmer takes the Cake by Alexis Hall (yes I know, I wrote about Hall’s new book last week, but sue me, this fits!) has a single mum breaking away from parental expectations to compete on a TV cooking contest and finding herself in a love triangle (sort of) with two of the other contestants. This isn’t as straight forward a romance as some of Hall’s other contemporary romances, but you do get a happily ever after even if you’re left guessing who it’s going to be with for a while.

It’s only a few months since The True Love Experiment by Christina Lauren was BotW so I can’t really justify writing about it in massive detail again here, but trust me when I say that it also fits this prompt – and is probably the closest to The Love Rematch and also more successful in execution than that is. And an honourable mention to Battle Royal by Lucy Parker, which isn’t actually set on a reality show, but that is where the hero an heroine first crossed swords.

Happy Reading!