Bookish Virginia

Disclaimer: I received a free digital Advance Reader Copy (ARC) of Faker from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. This book was published on October 8, 2019.

Title: Faker (Amazon, Goodreads)
Author: Sarah Smith
Genre: Contemporary Romance
My Rating: 3 / 5 stars

When I started reading this book, I wasn’t sure it was going to be one I finished. Something about the writing style was choppy, and I felt I got dumped into these characters and their goings-on in a way that was hard to warm up to. I just wasn’t connecting with Emmie very well and had a hard time understanding why she’d be interested in even interacting at all with Tate, who was just a total jerk. But somewhere around 1/3 of the way in, it all started to click, and I am so glad I didn’t give up. I loved the references to Hawaii (having grown up there myself) and the interracial relationship factor. It definitely added to a sweet romance and some awesome side characters.

I am not saying the plot was perfect (from my perspective)–it wasn’t. There were some pretty abrupt turnabouts on the parts of the characters, especially Tate, that were hard to find believable. These are eventually explained, and while the explanation makes some sense, I still couldn’t quite find his behavior realistic and believable. Nor was I really excited to completely forgive him. I feel like in some ways, this book is saying it’s okay for a guy to be a total jerk as long as later a good reason for it is revealed. But you know what? It’s not okay for a guy to be a jerk like that, not really ever. So that is a not-so-pet peeve I have with the book.

All that said, there was a lot of stuff I liked to outweigh the stuff that didn’t work for me. I thought Emmie was so sweet and I liked how she took care of her family, even through a lot of hard circumstances they had been through. And in the end, I couldn’t help but like Tate despite my extreme reservations. I cheered for them as they sorted their relationship out.

Overall, this is a read I liked but didn’t love, and I’d be interested in reading more from this author in the future! Thank you so much to Berkley for sharing this book with me!