A couple of years ago now, in spring 2023 I read a pair of books about a famous person and a normal (or normalish) person – Nora Goes Off Script and Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld. Since then I’ve read a bunch more because it really seems to be a trend, and since then we e had a positive rash of romances about campus people and normal people, or just involving famous or famous adjacent people. And I suspect the flood is not over yet because Parasocial relationships with famous people means these things sell. So for this week’s Recommendsday I’ve got a bit of a round of some of the others that I’ve read. And be warned, this is less a list of recommendations, more a survey of my reading…
The Break-Up Pact by Emma Lord
The premise here is good (if a bit far fetched) – with two former best friends doing some fake dating to reclaim the narrative after their respective relationship breakups go viral – but the reality of it is that I found it a really frustrating read. Neither the hero nor the heroine seems capable of using their words ever, and almost everything about their relationship (or lack thereof) and everything that goes wrong could have been sorted with a proper conversation. Add to that the fact that the heroine is both too stupid/naïve to live as well Peak Not Like Other Girls and the hero is incapable of making a decision on his own, and the only reason I made it to the end of this was to see if her ex got sufficient comeuppance for dumping her for his reality TV show co-star. Spoiler: he did get some comeuppance, but not really at the hands of the heroine. Which given how the rest of the book had gone for her was unsurprising by that point. Deeply, deeply annoying.
Love Songs and Ferry Tales by Julie Farley
This is a famous person-normal person type romance set on an island in the Pacific Northwest. Although there were things I liked about it, the pacing didn’t feel quite right to me – the ending wrapped up far too fast and didn’t quite resolve everything that the prior narrative felt it should have done. And your tolerance for deception may impact how much you enjoy the romance as the heroine doesn’t know the hero’s real identity for quite a lot of the book (and your ability to believe she wouldn’t have recognised him). A couple of the characters are meant to be British – but you wouldn’t really know except for odd bits of (not remotely accurate*) British trivia dropped in from time to time- which as a Brit really annoyed me! Also for me her brothers tipped over from fun comic relief into meanness. So not entirely successful for me – in fact I downgraded it a star on Goodreads while writing this review when I realised how much about it annoyed me!
How to Fake it In Hollywood by Ava Wilder
Grey’s role in a long running show has just ended and she needs to give her career a boost. So she agrees to a fake relationship with a troubled heartthrob. Ethan is newly divorced, newly sober and in mourning for his best friend; but he wants to produce the last movie they wrote together so he agrees to the plan to try and get everything back on track. And obviously sparks fly. This is another where I have distinctly mixed feelings. I bought it off the back of the preview, but for me the rest of the book doesn’t live up to the promise of that. It’s a fake relationship trope which I love but there’s not enough character development and growth here for me. There are some similar issues going on with Ethan and the hero to Funny You Should Ask, but in that book you get to spend large amounts of time with later Gabe and see that he really has changed and got a handle on stuff. You don’t have that here, and I’m not sure that I actually wanted them to end up together – I think Grey deserved better or at least more time to see that Ethan really has sorted himself out. Never mind.
I also read Melissa Ferguson’s Famous for a Living a year or two back which probably falls within the scope of this post- it’s about an influencer who goes to work at a national park in Montana after her career implodes and a rugged park ranger. When you read it, it’s more a voyage of self discovery than a romance – and there’s a lot of heavy lifting on that front done at the end. Still I did want to visit the national park afterwards, even if I didn’t love the book!
And that’s your lot. You could probably add Thank you for Listening to this list, but I’ve already written about it once and this is meant to be stuff I haven’t told you about before, but I did like it more than I like any of the three I have written about here so there’s that in its favour!
Happy Humpday!
*spoilers ahead: the hero grew up in Watford which is described as “Our town is far enough outside of London to not be a commuter town. Most people work in the factories and businesses nearby” and at one point says “ Sam and I took the Tube in a couple of times in high school, but we never had enough money to do anything once we got there.” The idea that Watford is not a commuter town is absolutely laughable and that someone living there would only have been into London from there a couple of times as a teen is frankly insane. I commute through Watford every week day and it is a) only 15 miles from central London and b) inside the tfl network so is actually massive commuter area as is evidenced by the fact that my train fills to full and standing only every time it stops there. Its like saying that no one from New Jersey commutes in to New York to work. Thus I suspect that the author has never been to Britain.
