Title: Pretending He's Mine Series: Love on Cue #2
Author: Mia Sosa
Published: April 10, 2018
Genre(s): Romance: Contemporary
Page Count: 432
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:For Hollywood agent Julian Hart, representing his best friend—megastar Carter Williamson—means it’s nearly impossible to keep his personal life and career separate. To make matters worse, Carter’s younger sister has been starring in Julian’s wildest fantasies more often than he’d care to admit. He knows she’s off-limits, but when Ashley shows up on his doorstep, needing a place to crash… suddenly his greatest temptation is sleeping down the hall.
Free-spirited Ashley Williamson doesn’t do commitment. Jobs, apartments, men… why let herself be tied down? But she’s had a crush on her older brother’s best friend for years and she’s committed to making Julian want her, one towel-clad midnight encounter at a time. But just as things start heating up, their steamy flirtation is interrupted by Carter’s east coast wedding. Ashley has no desire to go home and face her reputation as the family disappointment. But living with—dare she say dating?—a successful, sexy film agent could give them something else to talk about.
Julian can’t believe he agreed to fake a relationship with the one woman he can never have. And it’s going to take more than a little willpower to remember it's all pretend. Or is it?
Mia Sosa’s Pretending He’s Mine is well…it’s not great. The book suffers from a serious inability to introduce meaningful conflict, and as a result, it’s nearly 400 pages of two people sitting around and doing nothing. It’s not that the protagonists, Ashley and Julian, were poorly-written characters. It’s not that the premise of the plot falls flat. The problem is simply that there is no story, no character growth, and no movement of any sort, until the last 20% of the book. And by then, what was the point? (Also: the sex scenes were terrible.)
I cannot emphasize enough that nothing happened in this book. The story begins with both characters having long-standing, deep-seated crushes on each other. Very quickly on, they become aware that said crushes are entirely requited. And for some reason, they both agree that they can never act upon their feelings—yet they continue to live in the same house, attend the same events, and even pretend to be dating for the benefit of their families. Basically, imagine a book where two people are really horny for each other, but don’t do anything about it for three hundred pages. It’s really A) boring and B) ridiculous.
Of course, the “reason” Ashley and Julian claim that they can’t be together is because Julian is best friends with Ashley’s older brother. In my opinion, this trope is iffy even at the best of times, but in Pretending He’s Mine, it wasn’t anything at all, because Sosa doesn’t do anything with it. There is no indication in the book that Ashley’s brother would be horrified if they started dating, nor any indication that it would seriously ruin the familial balance. It’s just an excuse the author provides, but it’s an excuse with no meat to it.
We’ve all read—or at least heard of—the too-familiar “manufactured conflict” in a romance novel. Usually this is exemplified when two people have a misunderstanding that could easily be resolved by a mature, adult conversation. What’s going on in this book goes beyond that, because while do two people have a misunderstanding (unrequited crushes), they do have a conversation about this problem (said crushes are, in fact, requited), yet somehow the issue is still there, according to the author. But really, there was zero reason for Ashley and Julian not to be together for the entire 400 pages of this novel. The entire book felt silly as a result. It’s a stagnant, stagnant storyline. And because they’re just sitting around and not acting on their feelings, there is also no development in the relationship between Ashley and Julian—because the only “relationship” they have is one of avoidance and denial.
So, all in all, I can’t say that I liked this. I thought that Mia Sosa’s writing was very good throughout most of the book. I thought the characters themselves were interesting people. But there was no conflict or meaningful development present at any point except the last few chapters. And that really ruined the overall quality of Pretending He’s Mine.
Also, I simply cannot take a book seriously if the heroine’s nipples are speaking. It’s a no from me, dog.
