The Fake Mate: A Fun Time

Author: Lana Ferguson

Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

I honestly wasn’t expecting much from this book as it seems like the author might have written it after picking a handful of tropes out of a hat, but, whether or not that was the origin of this story, I actually had a fun time with this.

This book is a contemporary, workplace romance that takes place between two doctors who work at a hospital, but we also get a bit of a twist as this is also a shifter, omegaverse story. We’ve also got some grumpy-sunshine, growly, possessive men and fake dating thrown in.

The general setup of this book is that our FMC, Mackenzie has been on too many bad dates set up by her grandmother, and she’s looking for a way to get out of being subjected to more of them. Our MMC, Noah, has been outed as an alpha to the hospital board, which he neglected to mention when applying for his job as a cardiologist. In this universe, there is a stigma that alphas are violent and quick to anger, which can lead to employment discrimination, though it’s believed that this is not an issue for mated alphas. So our main characters form a plan to form a fake relationship where they’ll pretend to be mates at work to fool the board and dating for Mackenzie’s grandmother to stop her setting Mackenzie up anymore.

There are a lot of tropes in here, and many of them have the potential to go into super problematic territory in terms of consent or portrayal of generally healthy relationships. However, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the author did a pretty good job with these elements.

Unlike the other shifter romance I read recently, which had many of the same tropes but was lazy and unoriginal, this was cute and the author definitely took time to build the relationship between the characters, which meant the omegaverse elements of this book (you can guess where those went) hit the way the author wanted them to rather than being cringy and uncomfortable.

Fair warning that this is a pretty smutty book. I think that’s what the author was going for, and I’m pretty sure that anyone reading a book with this list of tropes will expect that, but I figured it deserved saying just in case.

If the tropes I’ve listed are something that interests you, this will be a fun and easy read.