Author: Victoria Lavine
Year published: 2025
Category: Adult fiction (romance)
Pages: 336 pages
Rating: 4.5 out of 5
Location: (my 2025 Google Reading map): USA (CA, AK)
Summary: Beloved romance author Margot Bradley has a dark secret: she doesn’t believe in Happily Ever Afters. Not for herself, not for her readers, and not even for her characters, for whom she secretly writes alternate endings that swap weddings and babies for divorce papers and the occasional slashed tire. When her Happily Never After document is hacked and released to the public, she finds herself canceled by her readers and dropped by her publisher.
Desperate to find a way to continue supporting her chronically ill sister, Savannah, Margot decides to trade meet-cutes for murder. The fictional kind. Probably. But when Savannah books Margot a six-week stay in a remote Alaskan resort to pen her first murder mystery, Margot finds herself running from a moose and leaping into the arms of the handsome proprietor, making her fear she’s just landed in a romance novel instead.
The last thing Dr. Forrest Wakefield ever expected was to leave his dream job as a cancer researcher to become a glorified bellhop. What he’s really doing at his family’s resort is caring for his stubborn, ailing father, and his puzzle-loving mind is slowly freezing over—until Margot shows up. But Forrest doesn’t have any room in his life for another person he could lose, especially one with a checkout date.
As long snowy nights and one unlikely trope after another draw Margot and Forrest together, they’ll each have to learn to overcome their fears and set their aside assumptions before Margot leaves—or risk becoming a Happily Never After story themselves.
Review: I wanted to end my 2025 reading on a high note, so I chose a contemporary romance; they are usually a good read for me. And I enjoyed this one. This review will be short since I am cranking it out before heading off to the symphony for their New Year's Eve concert.
I liked the characters, the predictable Happily Ever After ending, the fun setting in Alaska, which allows for all sorts of shenanigans, the "perfect" sex, which is expected and appreciated, and the family dynamics that were an essential part of the storyline. Caring for family members' medical issues, putting aside one's own needs, and, in the end, figuring out that everyone needs a break sometimes, is all very real.
Challenges for which this counts:
- Bookish--main female character is a romance author
- Literary Escapes--Alaska
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