Fake (West Hollywood #1) by Kylie Scott

This was cute!

This is my second Kylie Scott and she is a fun time. Fake was very Cinderella coded and I’m a fan of that trope. If memory serves, I loved the trope in Text Appeal as well, and the free chapter at the end of this was for Pause, and it is coma trope which I kind of love! I read I Leave It Up to You by Jinwoo Chong last month which also has that trope, and it’s made me realise I really should look for more books with this particular trope. Is that weird? Like, nothing awful like some taboo books where there are consent issues at play, that’s gross in my opinion. More like a MC being in a coma, and waking up after a long period of time to their whole life changed, starting over, and finding a new love kind of coma trope. I would have thought that this would be too specific an ask, but like ‘I Leave It Up to You’, ‘Pause’ seems to have the same vibe.

But I digress!!!

On to reviewing Fake…

As I said, this was cute, and it started off strong. Norah being plucked from obscurity to redeem the bad boy actor. Patrick being all brooding and annoyed at having to save his reputation. It was a great start! I did find that the story moved forward a little too fast and we missed a lot. Like I would have liked reading about Norah wrapping up her life, she says MANY times that she hasn’t really got any friends, but she does have at least one, and she has jobs, one of those jobs being where she supposedly met and fell in love with Patrick. I would have liked to read their reactions to her leaving that job because ‘she fell madly in love with a customer’!

I also would have liked some more background for both MC’s, especially Norah, we get this kind of vague story about the supposed family curse but I mean that must come with a certain amount of trauma, and it was mostly glossed over. She seems to be dealing somewhat with the trauma by ‘dating herself’ but that’s not really a fix, and it’s never explored which felt like a wasted opportunity to me.

“So my version of dating yourself is all about doing fun and or indulgent activities while getting to know yourself and working on your shit.”

I also felt like Patrick’s heartbreak wasn’t explored very well, he thought he was in love with this woman, and then he gets spotted leaving her house after they got together, and she gets back with her husband and they both kind of threw him under the bus, and it’s not really explored‽ I mean he tells Norah about it, but I don’t feel like he ever actually processed what happened to him. It made for the scene where Norah gave him an ultimatum less impactful in my opinion.

One other thing that really bothered me, to the point of making me angry, was the use of male/female as nouns. This is something I can cope with in a shifter romance but in a contemporary it just gives me mad incel vibes and I don’t like it.

Overall though I enjoyed the story and the characters and I really did enjoy watching Norah and Patrick fall in love, Patrick in particular.

“I’m the worst, it’s true.”

“Yeah, well . . .” He sighed. “I’d rather your worst than anyone else’s best.”

My heart stuttered. “That was a pretty great thing to say.”

This looks to be the first in a series, and I assume that Cole and Jack will get their own books, or I hope that Cole and Jack (Jack in particular) get their own books. I also hope that we get more page time with Norah and Patrick in both those books because I feel like their story ended WAY too abruptly!

Synopsis:

He walks the red carpet. She’s more familiar with vacuuming one.

When a scandal tarnishes the reputation of hot as hell A-lister, Patrick Walsh, he needs a reputation rescue, pronto.

Enter waitress Norah Peers–a nobody who’s average with a capital A. She’s available, dependable, and has sworn off men for the rest of her natural born life. In other words: the perfect match for a no-strings fake romance.

For the right amount of money, she can avoid waitressing and play the part of his dependable down-to-earth girlfriend. What she can’t avoid–dammit–is the growing steam between them.

But being hounded by the paparazzi and having her life dissected on social media is a panic attack in the making. And while Patrick might be a charming rogue on screen, in real life he’s a six-foot-two confusing, gorgeous, brooding grump, who keeps her at a distance . . . but also makes her feel like this bond between them might be more than just an act.

Being dumped on cue should be no big deal. Except being fake with Patrick is the realist relationship Norah has ever had. What’s a girl to do, but flip the script, and ask for a re-match made in Hollywood?