The One Month Boyfriend – Roxie Noir

Solid 3.5 stars

I want to preface this by saying I absolutely loved Kat as a character! She’s the closest I’ve come to finding a character who is like me in temperament, and I loved that she didn’t immediately end up pregnant by the end of the story. As someone who absolutely does not want children, I was glad to see this be a facet of her character and made me feel closer to her.

This would’ve been a much higher star, but there were some rather large plot holes that I couldn’t look past. The first was Kat’s anxiety. Where did it come from? Her parents and family aren’t mentioned much, but it doesn’t seem to stem from any major trauma there. She passes over a mention of being bullied in high school; is that where her anxiety comes from? We got to explore Silas’ PTSD quite a bit, and I wish we would’ve learned more about Kat’s mental health struggles also.

Was Evan jealous? This whole scheme is concocted to hurt him and make him jealous, but we don’t see much of his reaction other than a few bouts of glaring and the like that could easily be explained away as being upset over large displays of PDA in the workplace. He’s extremely narcissistic, so I expected more possession and anger from him, more displays about how she just wants him back, etc. (since that’s what he believes).

Did Silas get his promotion? His end of the deal was that she pretended to be his girlfriend to his coworkers so that he would be looked on more favourably to be made partner or get a promotion. We never really saw much of his coworkers, and they were barely around any of them to try and get his coworkers to believe their ruse. Did it work? And also, why did Kat meet with her supervisors? Were complaints made by Evan, did she get promoted or a raise?

For this being an enemies-to-lovers fake dating story, I didn’t feel like it leaned into either trope as much as it should have. While I loved both Silas and Kat, they didn’t talk much or resolve much about what set them against each other in the past. Their fake dating scheme didn’t really seem to do much other than transition into real dating. I was waiting the whole last half of the book for the third act breakup so they could realize how meant to be they are, but it never happened. They’d transitioned into a relationship before the fake one had even expired.

This was fun, and I loved the relationship dynamic, but I’m missing some things that felt crucial for these tropes. Apparently, this series is a slight spinoff of another of her series, but I didn’t know that until after, and I was looking through reviews. I’m not sure if the other series would fill in many gaps, but it’s worth checking out, I suppose, just to see if it adds anything to my perception of these characters.