Pages: 336
Published by Berkley on October 8, 2019
Genres: adult, contemporary, Romance
Source: eARC from Publisher
Debut author Sarah Smith nails this fun and sexy multicultural romance where two office foes hammer out their differences to build a love that will last...
Emmie Echavarre is a professional faker. She has to be to survive as one of the few female employees at Nuts & Bolts, a power tool company staffed predominantly by gruff, burly men. From nine to five, Monday through Friday, she's tough as nails--the complete opposite of her easy-going real self.
One thing she doesn't have to fake? Her disdain for coworker Tate Rasmussen. Tate has been hostile to her since the day they met. Emmie's friendly greetings and repeated attempts to get to know him failed to garner anything more than scowls and terse one-word answers. Too bad she can't stop staring at his Thor-like biceps...
When Emmie and Tate are forced to work together on a charity construction project, things get...heated. Emmie's beginning to see that beneath Tate's chiseled exterior lies a soft heart, but it will take more than a few kind words to erase the past and convince her that what they have is real.
Faker is a contemporary romance standalone by author Sarah Smith. I really enjoyed Faker. This was an interesting book for me, because there were some things that really did annoy me, but then as I kept reading, I just loved the romance so darn much that by the time I was done I was conflicted on how I wanted to rate this book. On one hand, the overall romance was like a 5 for me. It was swoony, steamy and the characters had fantastic chemistry and there was awesome character growth throughout. On the other hand, I did have some annoyances with the characters and how the multicultural romance was handled that would have made for a much lower rating of the book. So I sat on my review for a while, and I ended up re-reading this book, and I enjoyed overall growth and romantic aspect of the romance just as much the second time. So I decided that my enjoyment outweighed my annoyances and the book should get a higher enjoyment rating in my book.
Let’s start with what I did like. I loved the main character, Emmie. Emmie is one of the only female employees at Nuts & Bolts, and as such she has to put up with a lot. Including her real piece of work co-worker, Tate. We will circle back to Tate later on because he started out as one of my major annoyances in the story, but don’t worry he really did grow on me. Emmie and Tate do have an enemies to lovers trope going on, but the overall plotline had so much more going on than mere enemies to lovers. Tate and Emmie are forced to work together on a project and things start to blossom from there. The more I saw these two interact, the more I fell in love. And trust me, I was a hard sell. Which leads me to what I didn’t love so much about Faker.
Tate was a huge jerk to Emmie. A jerk every single day. To the point where I had no idea how a romance could blossom. At all. And then once he revealed what type of person he really was, I enjoyed the softie romantic side of him so much that he completely won me over. And then we got to the “reason” why he was a jerk in the first place and, it just didn’t sit right with me. It irked me, and seemed to go against the multicultural romance aspect that this book was touting. I just thought there were so many different ways this conflcit could have gone about, and I think the author could have presented the romance and the multicultural aspect in some more interesting way than just describing the color of Tate’s skin. But again, those annoyances of mine fell into the background because I genuinely enjoyed these characters and their romance so darn much!
Reading this book contributed to these challenges:
- 2020 Tackle My TBR Reading Challenge
- Contemporary Romance Reading Challenge 2020
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