FAKE IT LIKE YOU MEAN IT

A podcaster finds herself stuck in a fake-dating scheme to please her ailing grandmother.

There’s no one Elle Monroe cares about more than her grandmother, Lovie. So, when Lovie’s Alzheimer’s worsens, Elle leaves her life in Chicago and her successful podcast behind to head back to her childhood home in Elkhart, Indiana. Elle doesn’t expect to find a man in the house—and certainly not in her old bed—but Adam Wheeler is Lovie’s new live-in nurse. Elle’s annoyance at finding a stranger in her room is dwarfed by her hurt that Lovie no longer remembers her. The disease makes Lovie cranky, mean, and sometimes even violent. Strangest of all, she’s convinced that Elle is actually a younger version of herself, while Adam is Bobby, her beloved late husband. Afraid to upset Lovie’s fragile state of mind, Elle and Adam pretend that they’re deeply in love, despite the fact that they initially can’t stand each other. What starts out as mutual dislike, however, quickly turns to attraction, which presents a problem because Elle plans to move back to Chicago as soon as Lovie has a new living situation lined up. In her debut, Murphy poignantly highlights the pain of caring for a relative with Alzheimer’s. Lovie’s struggle with the disease feels real in its specificity (such as her insistence that every day is Monday and her need to garden daily, even in the dead of winter). Elle and Adam have so much chemistry off the bat that it’s sometimes difficult to understand why they’re resisting a relationship; still, they’re both such likable characters that it’s fun to watch them realize what the reader has known all along.

A moving romance that balances the heartbreak of slowly losing a relative to Alzheimer’s with the thrill of falling in love.