Book Review | If The Ring Fits

Nothing beats a reading slump like a favourite author with a new book.

If The Ring Fits
Camilla Isley

When Life Gives You Lemons, Fake an Engagement

When investment banker Adrian and software engineer Rowena started the day, they didn’t expect to end it engaged! But Adrian has invented a fake fiancée to impress his CEO, regretting the lie almost immediately, and now he is in hot water. Meanwhile, Rowena’s career has just gone up in flames, leaving her unemployed, unexpectedly expecting with no father in the picture, and short of options. When fate throws these two hot messes into a meet-cute of epic proportions, it’s a match made in rock-bottom heaven. They say love is blind, and with nothing to lose, Adrian gets down on one knee… and Rowena says yes!

The rules of engagement are simple:

Pretend to be madly in love

Keep their real lives separate

Absolutely, positively do NOT catch feelings

However, faking it is harder than they thought, especially when every overnight stay comes with only one bed and zero personal space—blurring that imaginary line between ‘just business’ and ‘definitely personal.’

Soon, their carefully constructed charade starts to feel alarmingly… real. Can Adrian and Rowena stick to their engagement pact, or will their fake relationship graduate to something authentically messy, complicated, and wonderful?

Goodreads | The StoryGraph | Amazon

With most stories, there comes a moment where you have to suspend reality a little bit and with this one, it is pretty much when our two main characters meet for the first time. I feel like for some with this set of circumstances it will be too much of an ask but since I have read a lot of books by Camilla Isley and really enjoyed them I decided to trust her and buy into it, and I’m glad that I did because I loved this story.

I loved that we started with a flash forward to a crucial point in Rowena and Adrian’s relationship. It really set the tone of the story, added some nice tension, and made way for their kind of outlandish meeting. It made me eager to see what twists and turns the story would take, especially because I hadn’t looked at the blurb in a couple of months, so I was going in with a fairly clean slate.

The story was lovely and lighthearted, it explores how these two characters, who come together for convenience, spend most of their time trying hard not to fall for each other, and it was very entertaining watching the push and pull between them. I would say I don’t feel like we go too deep with this couple, but I didn’t mind that it was kept light, there was a more serious topic introduced towards the end of the book but it wasn’t explored too heavily.

I liked Rowena and Adrian, they had an easy and witty rapport which made their trying to stay separate from each other harder the more time they spent together. They also had very good chemistry which added some extra complications in the story. I was also happy to see some characters from a previous story show up in this one, especially my favourite fictional robot.

If The Rings Fits is a good fun romantic story with characters that I couldn’t help but care about, a delightful and entertaining read.

Camilla Isley is an engineer who left science behind to write bestselling contemporary rom-coms set all around the world. She lives in Italy and her first title for Boldwood, The Love Theorem, a Hollywood-meets-STEM romance, will be published in June 2023.

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