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September 2021 #TBRChallenge Review! WRITTEN IN THE STARS by Alexandria Bellefleur (Written in the Stars #1)

TBR Challenge 2021 graphic

#TBRChallenge time! I slacked off for a couple of months, but I’m back, baby!

September’s challenge theme is unusual (time/location/profession, etc.) and I decided Written in the Stars by Alexandria Bellefleur could work, since Elle is a social media astrologer. Plus, it was one of the group reads picked for Creating & Co’s Written in the Stars Readathon, so it could do double duty 😉

Goodness knows my TBR isn’t getting any shorter, so I’m going to make a concentrated effort to make a strong finish with this challenge for the rest of the year. Wish me luck!

Written in the Stars cover

With nods to Bridget Jones and Pride and Prejudice, a charming #ownvoices queer rom-com debut about a free-spirited social media astrologer who agrees to fake a relationship with an uptight actuary until New Year’s Eve—with results not even the stars could predict!

After a disastrous blind date, Darcy Lowell is desperate to stop her well-meaning brother from playing matchmaker ever again. Love—and the inevitable heartbreak—is the last thing she wants. So she fibs and says her latest set up was a success. Darcy doesn’t expect her lie to bite her in the ass.

Elle Jones, one of the astrologers behind the popular Twitter account, Oh My Stars, dreams of finding her soul mate. But she knows it is most assuredly not Darcy… a no-nonsense stick-in-the-mud, who is way too analytical, punctual, and skeptical for someone as free-spirited as Elle. When Darcy’s brother—and Elle’s new business partner—expresses how happy he is that they hit it off, Elle is baffled. Was Darcy on the same date? Because… awkward.

When Darcy begs Elle to play along, she agrees to pretend they’re dating to save face. But with a few conditions: Darcy must help Elle navigate her own overbearing family over the holidays and their arrangement expires on New Year’s Eve. The last thing they expect is to develop real feelings during a fake relationship.

But maybe opposites can attract when true love is written in the stars?

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Adorable and fun! The nods to Bridget Jones’s Diary and Pride and Prejudice are *very* slight–the initial dislike, a line or two, and some names–really, it’s mostly its own story.

Bonus: it’s a fake relationship story. Extra bonus: its heroines are freaking adorable–yes, even Darcy the actuary. Sometimes especially Darcy the actuary 😉 The steamy scenes were verrrry steamy–so bonuses all around!

My only real complaints are that their reason for starting the fake romance is a bit thin and that the book ended fairly abruptly–since they’d just made up at that point, I was a bit bummed to not get a *teensy* bit of Darcy-and-Elle-being-cute-in-a-comfortable-relationship time. Something to look forward to in the next book, I guess? Fingers crossed!

I listened to the audiobook, which I really enjoyed for the most part–Elle did a lot of emoji texting, though, and I kind of missed actually “reading” that part of it. On the whole, though, the narrator did a nice job with the narration. I’ll try not to wait so long to get to the second book, Hang the Moon.

Rating: 4 stars / A-

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