Dreamscape Media – Audiobook Review: 5 Stars

Thanks so much to the author, Libro.fm, and Dreamscape Media for the complimentary advanced audio copy of this book in exchange for my honest review. All opinions are entirely my own. { partner } All of my reviews can also be found on Instagram @Tackling_TBR and on my blog at tacklingtbr.home.blog

TW : estranged parent, discussion of cancer

This book was so much fun! As far as tropes go, fake-dating to real-romance isn’t one that I typically go out of my way to reach for, but I tend to read a good amount of them anyway. And this was a really fun example of it! This book made me laugh out loud in more than one place, and it gave me feels in a few other places as well.

The characters are far from perfect, but that is what I loved so much about them. Luc is a deeply flawed and troubled character, but it made him so much for fun to read than someone that you can only aspire to relate to. As for Oliver, he is the type of character that on the surface seems perfect but slowly becomes less perfect as the book goes on, which was also really fun. I thought that the chemistry was pretty believable, even if the arrangement that began the relationship seemed less than realistic. But as less-than-realistic as it could be, there were enough moments that felt really, truly raw and human that it made the relationship so much more believable, and that made it something that as I listened I needed to learn more about and see what happened next for them.

Let’s talk secondary characters. Luc’s mom (and his mom’s curry, equally a character in my eyes) almost stole the whole show for me. The scenes at her house were just so funny! It really felt like I remember feeling when I would bring boys home for dinner with my family – it was embarrassing, it was silly, and sometimes it was even difficult to get through. These scenes read just those same ways, and made them some of my favorite parts of the whole book!

Luc’s friends are also very big parts of the story, but they weren’t always quite as much fun as his mom was, at least in my opinion. You could tell that Luc had pushed his friends to the side a bit in recent years, and maybe hadn’t fostered those relationships in a healthy way, and so his friends seemed a bit “over it” with everything until the end of the story. I think we’ve all had at least one friendship where that has happened – maybe you or your friend got really drawn in to a relationship, and by the time that relationship ended the friendship had suffered because of it. That made the friendships feel fairly realistic, but it just wasn’t as much fun to read as the mom scenes. And that’s nothing against the writing, only saying that until the relationships with his friends thawed a bit (I would say about 3/4 of the way through the book) they just weren’t the characters whose scenes I looked forward to. Except for Alex, Luc’s innocent and incredibly gullible co-worker. He was hilarious and I want to know everything there is to know about him.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this story! I would recommend reading it, but I might specifically recommend the audiobook – the narrator’s voice was so soothing and nice to listen to, and his different voices to make each of the characters distinctly different were really great. Also, bonus point, if you listen to the audio you get to listen to the British accents. Which is always a good thing in my book! I think that the perfect setting to listen to this book in would be on an afternoon that you decide to take a long drive through somewhere beautiful just for the fun of it.