Tag Archives: Alexandria Bellefleur

Sweet Sapphic Chaos: The Fiancée Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur

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the cover of the Fiancee Farce

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“She was a total fucking goner. Whatever magic Tansy was made of, Gemma wanted to drown in it, revel in the honeyed heat burning her up from the inside out. It was better than the finest bourbon she’d ever had the pleasure of sipping.”

After losing her parents and a traumatic romantic experience as a teen, Tansy Adams focuses all her time and energy on her late father’s bookstore. To dodge questions about her love life, Tansy invents Gemma, a fake girlfriend inspired by the stunning cover model on a best-selling romance book. She never expected that real-life Gemma would step into her life, play along, and announce they were engaged, imploding that white lie into a full-on farce. Gemma van Dalen, the outcast of her wealthy family, needs a spouse to inherit Van Dalen Publishing, her grandmother’s legacy. In exchange for Tansy’s hand in marriage, Gemma offers to save Tansy’s beloved bookstore before it’s sold off. Can their marriage of convenience work, or will Gemma’s scheming family get between them?

“As for feeling like you’ve failed, well, failure is an inescapable part of life. But failing doesn’t make you a failure. And I’m sorry your father made you feel like the two were synonymous. You are more than your achievements, Gemma. You are brilliant, and ambitious, and you are good, do you hear me? And what you do or do not achieve in this life has no bearing on your value.”

Oh. My. Goddess. That’s right: goddess, because that’s exactly what these two cunning, sassy women are. Alexandria Bellefleur has taken the generally predictable “marriage of convenience” trope and turned it into an emotional, powerful story about finding the love you don’t realize you deserve. Both Tansy and Gemma are full of so much pain, their family trees full of broken branches (and in Gemma’s case, poisonous barbs). For them to find love and family in one another so unexpectedly (for them, at least, because, come on, that’s what we’re here for), so flawlessly…it’s not only swoon-worthy and sweet, but a relief. It’s the insane, instant, undeniable chemistry between Tansy and Gemma that empowers their every interaction from the start, but unlike other marriage-of-convenience stories, smut doesn’t drive their relationship. What starts off as a business relationship blossoms from a friendship to a true partnership. Gemma is sweet and giving as she navigates her first real relationship, while Tansy comes out of her shell to defend Gemma when no one else has. These goddesses support one another, even when the relationship is only a farce, until it all becomes real. The character development between them both is a flawless example of how empowering love—and having someone by your side—can really be.

As much as I loved every interaction between Gemma and Tansy, it’s difficult to love everything that happens outside of their sweet sapphic bubble. The toxic men—namely Tucker, Gemma’s cousin, who manipulated teenage Tansy and shared underage nudes of her—seem unrealistically cruel. Tansy’s step-mother goes from a social ladder-climbing step-Bridzilla to suddenly sympathetic. None of the secondary characters have real layers, making them no more than pawns to the story’s plot progression. Because of that, none of the conflicts or twists are surprising. The boardroom scene/resolution seemed beyond unrealistic, regardless of how sweet the gesture was. You may need to expand your suspension of disbelief and focus on the sapphic sweetness for this one.

Recommended for fans of Stars Collide, Cleat Cute, and Love at First Set. This heartwarming sapphic romance is full of feels: a stunning addition to any shelf.

✨The Vibes ✨

❤️ Fake Dating
❤️ Marriage of Convenience
❤️ Bi MCs (Bi4Bi)
❤️ Sapphic Romance
❤️ Mental Health Rep
❤️ Opposites Attract
🌶️ Spice

Alexandria Bellefleur Continues to Make Seattle the Romance Capital with The Fiancée Farce

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the cover of The Fiancée Farce

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In a year of reading romance novels, I have learned a lot about the genre. First, and most importantly, I enjoy it so much that I usually read an entire novel within a single twenty-four hour period. Another thing that I have noticed—something that threatens to temper that enjoyment from time to time—is how often romance plots revolve around class differences and wealth. Romance, it turns out, often costs money. Considering one of the main conventions of the romance genre is the grand gesture, that should be no surprise. Most of the time I can overlook this pesky intrusion of reality, but I was less successful in doing so while I was reading Alexandria Bellefleur’s latest, The Fiancée Farce (2023).

Before getting into The Fiancée Farce, I want to talk about Bellefleur’s previous three novels: Written in the Stars (2020), Hang the Moon (2021), and Count Your Lucky Stars (2022). These three Seattle-based novels share a cast of characters who I very much wish were real people with whom I could be friends. As someone who wishes she still had her Rainbow Brite doll, I am partial to Elle, one of the main characters of Written in the Stars. Darcy, the grumpy to Elle’s sunshine, is a great combination of ice and red hair. I could also easily see myself as Annie, the protagonist of Hang the Moon, who has found herself directionless and alone. She comes to visit her best friend Darcy in Seattle and meets Brendon, the man who wants to sweep her off of her feet.

Okay, so the M/F romance in Hang the Moon was definitely my least favorite part of these three novels. My second least favorite part, though, was Brendon’s obsession with grand romantic gestures. The convention of the grand gesture bothers me on some level because I don’t really think that it proves much of anything about one’s feelings for another person. Indeed, to me, it proves access to wealth and/or resources, which is why it should be no surprise that Brendon is the CEO of a matchmaking app company. Now, don’t get me wrong—Bellefleur approaches issues of class much more effectively in Count Your Lucky Stars. And, yes, I know that romances are escapist. Still, give me J.Lo’s “My Love Don’t Cost a Thing” over Richard Gere at the end of Pretty Woman any day.

Another potentially expensive romance trope is the marriage contract trope. While I understand the convention of money changing hands in a fake dating/marriage contract situation, six million dollars is quite a lot of money. That is how much Tansy Adams needs to keep her stepmother from selling her father’s beloved independent bookstore, above which she lives in an apartment filled with memories of her deceased parents. The novel begins with the culmination of a six-month-long deception, the purpose of which is to mollify her overbearing family. According to Tansy, she has been dating a woman named Gemma. Except Gemma isn’t real. Well, that isn’t entirely true—Gemma is real, but she is a romance cover model who Tansy has never met. Well, that also isn’t entirely true—Tansy hadn’t met Gemma until she arrived at her cousin’s wedding. The same wedding where Tansy had just inadvertently caught the bouquet.

The Fiancée Farce exists in the same Seattle as Bellefleur’s previous three novels. If Bellefleur is not on the city of Seattle’s payroll yet, she should be, because I have never seen a better advertisement for the Emerald City than her novels. Of course, the reality of living in Seattle requires a cost-of-living conversation, a conversation that lives at the heart of The Fiancée Farce. Ultimately, the plot of the novel revolves too closely around the exchange of money to capture the whimsy of Bellefleur’s previous three novels. Gemma’s family, the van Dalens, as well as her friends (who have clearly spent some time with Rory Gilmore and Logan Huntzberger in the Life and Death Brigade) too persistently hammer in the trope of immoral wealth. There is also a subplot involving Tucker van Dalen that I could have lived without. We get it—rich people often don’t behave well.

Bellefleur creates a cast of awful family and eccentric friends to show that Gemma van Dalen is not like them. The reader, though, is ready to believe that from her first appearance, not to mention that half the book is from her point of view. If Gemma didn’t have a heart of gold, how could she possibly earn the love of down-to-earth and delightful Tansy? I think the answer to that question is what I have taken away the most from a year of reading romance novels: the delight in reading these novels is that I know what is going to happen, and it makes me happy. The author’s main responsibilities are to create characters who I’d like to meet in real life and to ensure the delight of predictability. Of the four novels by Alexandria Bellefleur that I have read in the past month, The Fiancée Farce is the one that sparked the least delight. Tansy is adorable, and Gemma indeed has charm—but I hope that Bellefleur will dump the rest of the van Dalen family into the Puget Sound in her next novel.

Content Warning: revenge porn

Liv (she/her) is a trans woman, a professor of English, and a reluctant Southerner. Described (charitably) as passionate and strong-willed, she loves to talk (and talk) about popular culture, queer theory, utopias, time travel, and any other topic she has magpied over the years. You can find her on storygraph and letterboxd @livvalentine.

Landice reviews Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur

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Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur (Amazon Affiliate Link)

Written in the Stars is probably hands down the most adorable contemporary romance I’ve ever read. To be fair, I don’t read a ton of books in this genre, but I’ve at least read enough to know that this one is something special!

I just spent twenty minutes trying to write an analogy comparing Written in the Stars to peppermint hot chocolate that wasn’t super cheesy, to no avail, so I’ve decided to channel my inner Elle and just.. go with it: Reading Written in the Stars was like sitting down with my first peppermint hot chocolate of the season. The story was warm, inviting, and familiar enough to be comforting, but it also felt new and unique enough that nothing about it felt stale or contrite.

One thing I really appreciated about this book was that it didn’t get mired down in extended mutual pining the way romance novels often do. Not that there’s anything wrong with slow burn romances, but sometimes I want to be able to relish in the actual togetherness of the characters instead of spending the majority of the novel wanting to push the two leads’ faces together like Barbie dolls, screaming “just kiss already!” The author did an excellent job of finding the sweet spot between insta-love and slow burn, and the result is a compulsively readable novel with an adorable opposites attract romance that felt totally realistic and incredibly satisfying. It’s also worth noting that while there was enough tension to sustain the plot, the angst never felt superfluous or like it was thrown in just for the hell of it.

My only complaint about Written in the Stars was that I wasn’t ready for it to end when it did! I really loved Elle and Darcy together, and while I understand that it’s not always realistic to include an epilogue when you’re planning a sequel that will likely pick up around the time the first book lets off, it doesn’t mean I have to be happy about it (I kid… mostly).

One more thing I want to state for the record, in case I’m not alone in this concern: I went into this read worried that my lack of astrological knowledge might be an issue, but my concern was completely unfounded! In fact, I think Elle’s narrative explanation of Darcy’s sun, moon, and rising signs helped me understand what the “big three” placements really mean better than any of the articles I’d read online.

In closing, Written in the Stars is a cute, quirky sapphic romance that is (for me at least) the book equivalent of a cup of hot chocolate and a warm hug. If this sounds like something there’s even a slim chance you might enjoy, then please give it a go. It was honestly wonderful, and now I’m definitely rambling, but I cannot recommend it enough!

ARC Note: Thank you to Avon and Netgalley for a digital ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions and terrible, cheesy analogies are my own.

Landice is an autistic lesbian graphic design student who lives on a tiny farm outside of a tiny town in rural Texas. Her favorite genres are sci-fi, fantasy & speculative fiction, and her favorite tropes are enemies-to-lovers, thawing the ice queen, & age gap romances. Landice drinks way too much caffeine, buys more books than she’ll ever be able to read, and dreams of starting her own queer book cover design studio one day.

You can find her as manicfemme on Bookstagram &Goodreads, and as manic_femme on Twitter. Her personal book blog is Manic Femme Reviews.

Emily reviews Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur

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Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur (Amazon Affiliate Link)

This book is sold as Bridget Jones meets Pride and Prejudice, and it does have nods to both of those, but it’s a delightful story all of its own. The story begins with Darcy and Elle having a disastrous first date. However, Elle is working with Darcy’s brother, so they can’t just pretend it never happened. After Darcy pretends to her brother that it went well in order to stop him setting her up again, she has to persuade Elle to fake-date. If you’ve read much romance you can probably predict most of the plot from there–shenanigans as they play up the romance in public and the inevitable development of real feelings.

As ever with this trope the “reasons” they fake date are a little dubious, but in this case it made sense within the story. It helped that both Darcy and Elle were very well realised characters. At the start of the book, Darcy appears to be anti-social, particular about her life and married to her work. Elle seems like a fun-loving free spirit. However, throughout the book we learnt more and more about them and they both became increasingly complex. We got to dive quite deep into their characters and the way their personalities interacted. They were very different–the book had both of their points of view, which I loved–and the way their contrasting personalities gradually came to complement each other was really well done. You got to see opposite points of view on several topics, which was fun. Both of them were also really sweet and likeable. I found it impossible not to root for them. Their romance was also well developed. It was really shown how much the characters came to like each other as friends as well as just being attracted to each other. This is something I find is often underdone in romance books, so I was pleasantly surprised by how well it was done here.

I also loved that both of the characters had other problems that they were working through, and that they both developed throughout the story. There’s a storyline about Elle’s relationship with her family, her business and one about Darcy’s past relationships. I will say some of this I found to be less interesting than other bits–for example, there’s quite a lot of astrology in this book, which personally I’m not super interested in. On the other hand, neither was Darcy, so the book did acknowledge the sceptic point of view.

The story is obviously quite focused on Elle and Darcy, but the side characters that were introduced were also given a lot of personality and I enjoyed reading about all of them. Elle’s best friend Margot and Darcy’s brother Brendan get quite a bit of page time, and it was really enjoyable to see the different ways they acted and were perceived in each of the points of view. Bellefleur did a great job of avoiding some obvious cliches for these characters too. All of their actions felt extremely realistic and character driven, rather than just to drive forward the romance plot (which can be another common pitfall of romance books).

There is some miscommunication in this book, so be aware if that’s something you dislike in romances. However, it’s very minimal, and I think it was justified well by the character’s backstories.

Overall this was a lighthearted read that I got through very quickly, and the most enjoyable romance I’ve read in a while. If you’re looking for a sweet sapphic romance you should definitely pick this up when it comes out!