Old Flames and New Fortunes by Sarah Hogle
Rating: 3.5/5 (Rounding up to 4 for Goodreads, Amazon, etc)
Spice: 2/5
Plot: 3/5
Primary Genre: Paranormal/Fantasy Romance
Blurb: A small, magical town tucked away in rural Ohio, Moonville is the perfect place for flora fortunist Romina Tempest to expand her shop, where she uses the language of flowers to help the hopeful manifest their love lives. After giving up on her own big romance eleven years ago, at least she can bask in the promise of others’. So, when the shop’s potential financier shares news of his wedding, Romina jumps on the opportunity to discuss buying the business. What better place to negotiate a deal than at a wedding, even if she has to fake-date her chaotic colleague Trevor to get an invitation? But all hell breaks loose when she discovers Trevor’s soon-to-be stepbrother is none other than Alex, her high school sweetheart. Her greatest love. The boy who, eleven years ago, broke her heart, and who now thinks she and Trevor are dating. What starts as an innocent misunderstanding becomes a week-long fake dating scheme, as Romina resolves to make Alex pay for breaking her heart. The only issue? She can’t deny their still-burning connection. Caught between proving to Alex what he lost, and coming clean and risking her business, Romina must decide whether giving Alex another chance means going back on herself, or finally releasing her hold on the past.
The Good:
* I laughed out loud. And not the millennial LOL that gets tacked onto the end of a text so it doesn’t seem hostile. The beginning of the book takes on this whole enemies/revenge on my ex type of vibe and some of that was simply hilarious to me.
* Trevor. This extends a bit into the LOL bullet point but I absolutely love his character. He’s simply hilarious. He reminds me of a cross between Shaggy and Scooby Doo, if they morphed into one character. I am not ashamed to say, he’s probably my favorite character in the book.
* Alex. While they’re in the midst of this whole fake-dating/revenge scenario, Alex has this moment where he goes kind of insane. If a man did that in real life I’d be like “Dude, are you mental?!” But in the book, it’s cute.
The Meh:
* I found some of the internal monologue annoying. There was a bit of an obsessive, overdramatized monologue about the desire to be a parent that I just didn’t understand. I get it if it’s coming from someone unable to conceive but from the perspective of a single girl who wants a kid it just came off as extremely odd and dramatic to me. Maybe I don’t get it because I’m a parent and I’m being insensitive, I don’t know. It just seemed strange to me.
Bottom Line:
This is a super slow burn romance and the romance plot was kind of slow moving. The book felt more like a 3.5 to me but I’ve got to round it up to a 4 because it made me laugh out loud physically TWICE. The second half of the book is so much better than the first, it totally redeems the slow pace of the first half. This book really ticked me off a few times but the end was worth it. I would recommend this to anyone who loves a fake dating plot or a witchy romance, especially a witchy romcom. I’m doing an ARC read for book #2 in this series which releases in April so look out for that review, you will be seeing that soon!
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