My name is Elle Rivers, and I’ve been a romance reader and writer for over ten years. I started reading when I was in high school because I was a lonely kid who loved watching people fall in love. I love the romance genre because it always has a happy ending, and reading about characters overcoming their struggles reminds me that I can also face any hard moments in life. I try to write the same kinds of characters in my books. They’re all a piece of me, and I am so excited that others can read them, too.
My book follows Lily, who is forced to marry Sebastian for five years. The book begins in year four of their marriage, in a time where she’s sure he’s in love with someone else, and is counting down the days until the end of their marriage. But then they get sent across the country to Nashville. Here, she sees a side of Sebastian that she likes, a softer, kinder side.
But only one year of their fake marriage remains, and they have four years of baggage following them. Can they fall in love? Or will contractual obligations get in the way?
This book was THE book that made me want to write a marriage in trouble.
It features characters to absolutely hate in the first few chapters, but then they turn it around and become lovable by the end of the book. I love the idea of a married couple (or engaged one) sleeping in separate rooms because of their distance and then they slowly move back into the same room.
This book also features a terrible mom who gets owned by her kid who’s finally had enough of them, which is always my favorite part of any book. This is a novel to get hooked on, and the ending scene where she finds their wedding invitations in the trash had my jaw on the FLOOR!
When your nemesis also happens to be your fiancé, happily ever after becomes a lot more complicated in this wickedly funny, lovers-to-enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy debut.
Naomi Westfield has the perfect fiancé: Nicholas Rose holds doors open for her, remembers her restaurant orders, and comes from the kind of upstanding society family any bride would love to be a part of. They never fight. They’re preparing for their lavish wedding that's three months away. And she is miserably and utterly sick of him.
Naomi wants out, but there's a catch: whoever ends the engagement will have to foot the nonrefundable wedding…
This book follows a writer named January, who goes to her father’s beach house that he shared with his mistress after his passing.
I love it when a character's backstory has a unique twist to it, and I could feel January’s pain and confusion as she navigated her father’s complicated past. We get to see January grow as a person and also have a romance with the writer next door.
Love stories with complex character growth are my bread and butter, and this was the novel that started it all for me.
FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION AND BOOK LOVERS!
A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.
Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.
They’re polar opposites.
In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they're living in neighboring…
This book is about a woman named Stella, who enters a competition to save her Christmas Tree farm from financial ruin, but she needs a fake boyfriend to sell the story.
Who is better than her best friend, Luka, who she secretly has a crush on?
I am a sucker for Christmas romance novels, and the obvious LONGING from Luka was my favorite part of the book. We spend the entire novel in Stella’s head, and I love it when the main male character is obviously in love with them but she can’t see it yet.
Two best friends fake date to reach their holiday happily ever after in this first romantic comedy in the Lovelight series.
A pasture of dead trees. A hostile takeover of the Santa barn by a family of raccoons. And shipments that have mysteriously gone missing. Lovelight Farms is not the magical winter wonderland of Stella Bloom’s dreams.
In an effort to save the Christmas tree farm she’s loved since she was a kid, Stella enters a contest with Instagram-famous influencer Evelyn St. James. With the added publicity and the $100,000 cash prize, Stella…
This novel is about a PH.D. candidate, Olive, who fake-dates a professor to make her best friend feel better about falling in love with her ex-boyfriend. It’s a wild premise, but I love suspending my own beliefs and falling into a romance novel.
This is another one of those single point-of-view books where the main character is incredibly dense, and we KNOW her fake boyfriend, Adam, is so in love with her.
There are also hints of sexism in the STEM field, which is very realistic, and this story touches on it exactly how a romance novel should, with a few moments of despair and a happy ending.
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A BuzzFeed Best Summer Read of 2021
When a fake relationship between scientists meets the irresistible force of attraction, it throws one woman's carefully calculated theories on love into chaos.
As a third-year Ph.D. candidate, Olive Smith doesn't believe in lasting romantic relationships--but her best friend does, and that's what got her into this situation. Convincing Anh that Olive is dating and well on her way to a happily ever after was always going to take more than hand-wavy Jedi mind tricks: Scientists require proof. So,…
This novel is set in the fictional amusement park of Honeywood Acres, and it follows two characters who pretend to date as their characters in the park. I love a good fake dating story, especially when it’s for a job, and the two leads hate each other at the start of the book.
It’s a slower burn, which is always fun because it gives us time to fall in love with the characters. The author has a talent for world-building, and I got lost in this book!
Neuroscience PhD student Frankie Conner has finally gotten her life together—she’s determined to discover the cause of her depression and find a cure for herself and everyone like her. But the first day of her program, she meets a group of talking animals who have an urgent message they refuse to share. And while the animals may not have Frankie’s exalted human brain, they know things she doesn’t, like what happened before she was adopted.
To prove she’s sane, Frankie investigates her forgotten past and conducts clandestine experiments. But just when she uncovers the truth, she has to make an impossible choice: betray the animals she’s fallen in love with—or give up her last chance at success and everything she thought she knew.
Frankie Conner, first-year graduate student at UC Berkeley, is finally getting her life together. After multiple failures and several false starts, she's found her calling: become a neuroscientist, discover the cause of her depression and anxiety, and hopefully find a cure for herself and everyone like her.
But her first day of the program, Frankie meets a mysterious group of talking animals who claim to have an urgent message for her. The problem is, they're not willing to share it. Not yet. Not until she's ready.
While Frankie's new friends may not have her highly evolved, state-of-the-art, exalted human brain,…
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