Lovelight Farms (Lovelight #1) – B.K. Borison

Genre: Romance
Publisher: Independently published
Pages: 409
Release Date: November 10, 2021

Where the lovelight gleams …

A pasture of dead trees. A hostile takeover of the Santa barn by a family of raccoons. And shipments that have mysteriously gone missing. Lovelight Farms is not the magical winter wonderland of Stella Bloom’s dreams.

In an effort to save the Christmas tree farm she’s loved since she was a kid, she enters a contest with instafamous influencer Evelyn St. James. With the added publicity and the $100,000 cash prize, she might just be able to save the farm from its financial woes. There’s just one problem. To make the farm seem like a romantic destination for the holidays, she lied on the application and said she owns Lovelight Farms with her boyfriend. Only … there is no boyfriend.

Enter best friend Luka Peters. He just came home for some hot chocolate, and somehow got a farm and a serious girlfriend in the process.

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Lovelight Farms is seemingly the perfect book for me. It features some of my favourite tropes: friends-to-lovers and fake dating. Unfortunately, Lovelight Farms lacks chemistry and believability, especially at the end.

The chemistry between Luka and Stella is lukewarm at best. I wish the novel would have started earlier as Stella first applied for the competition. This way, readers would have seen more of Luka and Stella’s friendship before they started fake dating. This would have built more tension and angst.

Stella bothered me quite a bit throughout the story. The lack of communication and her outright disbelief at something near the end of the novel was irritating. When someone you’ve grown incredibly close to after 9 years of friendship tells you something point blank, you believe them you don’t immediately shut it down, especially after everything that previously happened.

A lot of Lovelight Farms was spent establishing the characters who now have their own spinoff novels. This was the time Stella and Luka needed to develop their tension and angst.

Overall, Lovelight Farms was lackluster in its chemistry between the main characters thereby making everything else about the novel fall flat. Though, the setting was perfect. 

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Have you read Lovelight Farms? What did you think?