I started reading Fake Dating the Italian Heir by Ally Blake last night. The story centers around Nico, whose family has a winery outside the fictional Australian small town of Vermillion. His family also owns a good chunk of the commercial real estate in town and leases it out to small business owners. Tourists come for the winery, are charmed by the cutesy small town with cutesy businesses - everybody wins. Nico's father died when he was a teenager and since then Nico has strapped on his Superman cape and assumed the role of Big Fish, Small Pond. He's running himself ragged, running the winery, checking in on the business owners, being part of the town's volunteer emergency response team. When he "dates" it's always women who don't live in town and casual hook-ups. Why? Because after his father died, his mother fell apart. He and his younger sister were left emotionally adrift. He responded by throwing himself into the role Town Savior and his sister chose to leave town the minute she could. His mother now seems a bit concerned that Nico didn't "choose" his own life but no matter, she's packing up and moving back to Italy where their father is buried. Probably to throw herself on the man's grave - but whatever.
Our heroine is Laila, a newcomer to town who runs the local romance-only bookstore. She was a Big Shot Crisis Manager in Sydney - the sort of fixer who bails out rich people and politicians. It was a job she was uniquely suited for because of her mother. Mommy was a wide-eyed fairy tale dreamer. The sort who always thought the next guy was Prince Charming. Laila was always bailing her out of one situation or another. Laila is smart, funny, successful, but guarded to the point of aloof. When guys meet her they think they've hit the jackpot. A woman who isn't clingy, a woman who won't cramp their style - until they realize that even they can't break through that shield of aloofness. This leads to her getting dumped right before her wedding. Not wanting to be "beholden" to her ex (🙄), she takes on the bills of the called off nuptials (because of course she does), packs her car and starts driving. Which is how she ends up in Vermillion, in front of an empty store front, and decides to realize her dream of opening a bookstore.
These two rub each other in all the wrong ways. Nico with his Big Man on Campus schtick and Laila with her hidden vulnerabilities and secrets. See, she's also sleeping in the back room of the bookstore. A big no-no since the businesses aren't zoned for residential. But when a big bill from the her Not Wedding came in, she couldn't afford both rent on the bookstore and rent on her apartment - so sleeping in the storage room is temporary - until her landlord Nico finds her out.
For 43% of this book the author builds up the small town, the quirky small town residents, and the Love/Hate Push/Pull between Nico and Laila. Nico shares with Laila the tragedy of his father's death, but at this point Laila still hasn't shared any tidbits from her past - the baggage with her mother (now deceased), her called off wedding etc. There's a lot going on, plenty in the way of conflict, and competent world-building that I'm now sucked into this tiny fictional town. So what happens? A shoe-horned in trope that doesn't have to be there.
Nico finds out Laila is sleeping and living in the bookstore. He lays off their Fight Flirting for a minute and offers to help her out - getting some work done in the bookstore to make it livable, clearing the problem with the zoning. I can think of any number of things that could have happened next - namely, Laila staying in Nico's family home (or on the property) while he fixes up the bookstore so she can live there and that will also help Nico out by making the other women in town who drool over him think he and Laila "might" be an item. But no. Instead we get: Nico needs to fly to San Francisco and go to a Napa Valley winery to check on a project he has there but the guy who runs the place has a daughter who snuck into his bed the last time he was there and it sure would help if Laila would come along and pretend they're a couple to keep her in check because Nico doesn't want to muddy the business deal and he has a feeling his mother and this dude would love him to marry the daughter to form a partnership between our families.
Like, WUT?!
After spending the first 43% of this book setting up the small town, Nico's baggage, and Laila's baggage, we're going to shoehorn in a trip to California, another set of secondary characters, and a fake dating trope. I realize fake dating is right there in the title of the book, but it doesn't change the fact we're leaving behind all the groundwork with the small town angle that was previously laid to head to another continent on Nico's family's private jet (because, of course) to throw another trope log on the fire. Some of you are probably reading this and thinking "What's the big deal Wendy?" but you know what? I was done.
I have been reading Harlequins for as long as I've been reading romance. I know my way around tropes. I love tropes. What I don't love is the current climate we're experiencing here in Romancelandia, brought down around our heads by influencers, Tiktok, and publishers who have no clue what they're doing (I said what I said). They have crammed Tropes = Marketing down our collective throats. Tropes are fun. Tropes are great. Tropes should not be your sole source of conflict and tropes are not the totality of what romance is about. Tropes should be the sprinkles, they should not be the whole damn donut. And that's my problem. This book was going along just fine until we take a hard right turn into Trope Conflict Land. There's no need for it. There's plenty of set-up, conflict, and Love/Hate shenanigans going on with the couple to feed a story the size of a Harlequin Romance (less than 200 pages). The author found my current pet peeve, my hot button was pressed, and y'all I'm done.
I've DNF'ed more egregiously terrible books in my day, but I simply cannot go on. My current reading mood is too fragile and I'm now excessively cranky to the point of unreasonable. This probably doesn't read like a big deal for the outsiders looking in. I'll concede it's probably not. But between Harlequin Romance abandoning all heroes who aren't wealthy tycoons in recent years and the current state of marketing romance, I'm full up.
Final Grade = DNF
8 comments:
Yeah, no; when half the story is gone and then you change not just venue but the entire vibe of the story, and have less than a hundred pages to force this into one coherent book? I don't think so.
I to am tired of the current trend of mistaking a pile of tropes for plot and character development; my own reading mojo is far too fragile--when it's even present--to risk this kind of thing.
But damn, I'm sorry as hell that we don't get to see the ending to the story set up in that first half.
Hear hear, or however the hell you spell that. And perhaps the worst thing about the current trope-o-rama is it makes it so easy for the fake book peddlars!
One reason I stopped reading Harlequins. Tropes are a curse. They should occur naturally through a story, not just pop up for the sake of using a trope. Somebody's editor suggested it, for sure. They tried to ruin a historical I sent into them. The hero was a shy duke, and his problem was his shyness. He had a mistress, but it was a purely transactional thing, and when he found his heroine, the woman who gave him the confidence he needed to do his job, he paid off his mistress, with a little bit of conflict when she found out he had one. They asked me to make the mistress a spiteful person who wanted to get her own back on the wife, to create more conflict. It really didn't need it, but I did it and I hated it, withdrew the book and had it published somewhere else. The conflict was so hackneyed, even back then, that I felt nothing writing it.
And if the trope is the point of the story, it makes it really easy to get AI to write the story for you. Give them the tropes, tell them it's character A and Character D, and it will do the rest for you.
I may have rage read the rest, but as I have entered my gleeful DNF era (a great side benefit of being an Official Hag), maybe not.
I'll just add my voice to the chorus: tropes are a tool, not the entirety of a whole damn book.
Ditto from my heart to you and the comments. It's amazing how, on average, I have so much more to talk about and feel about the older books I read for your challenge than a lot of romance ARCs. The way I feel so disconnected from romance readers on Threads, TikTok has had me really wobbling if I should even be reviewing new pub anymore. I've bemoaned the same craft, depth, trope issues for what feels like 3yrs now and at some point I guess I really just am not the audience wanted anymore.
It's kind of scary we're all saying the same thing, isn't it? And OMG, I didn't even think about the AI aspect! God, that's Depressing AF.
I don't keep track, but I feel like I downloaded fewer Harlequins this past year than in the past. Part of that is most of my favorite lines have been killed off but the other part of it is that finding the "regular" hero who isn't a billionaire tycoon is getting close to impossible. I miss the stories I used to be able to readily find in Harlequin Romance and Harlequin SuperRomance especially....
Excuse me while I go sit in my rocking chair and bemoan how things were "back in my day...."
A little late with my 2c, but basically I agree with everything. This ridiculous turn to tropeland, plus the impending demise of MMPB in favor of more expensive trade, has made me even less likely to buy new these days, period. I have enough vintage romance on my Mount TBR that I will probably never read it all, so to me it's no great loss to not keep up with the latest-n-greatest. I have a handful of authors that I will auto-buy and that's basically enough for me.
However - I do tend to give Harlequin authors more of a shot than any others, and when I went through their latest offerings just now, I kept this post in mind. I read a lot of sample chapters and passed up things that struck my fancy as "maybe". Give me the crazypants of Presents instead of the ever-shifting goalposts of the Romance and SE lines *shudder* At least I know what I'm in for!
Eurohackie: I'm a late-bloomer to Presents but that's EXACTLY it! Say what you want about Presents overall, but you know what you're getting. The Romance line's shift to All Tycoons All the Time has been super disheartening and I just haven't been gravitating towards Special Editions even though I have a ton in my TBR. I need to pick up a few of those this year and just try them at this point - see if that line is still working for me. It did back in the day, but here we are in 2026.
Harlequin Historical is still doing me a solid. My last great category discovery is probably Ann McIntosh in Medicals. If nothing else I need to read more of what I have by her in my TBR because what I have read hasn't disappointed me yet.
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