“Why was it so hard to find good mainstream media where you could see two girls falling in love with a happy ending? Even harder if I wanted to find stories with black girls. Brazilian black girls falling in love? Mostly, I’d only found them in indie and self-published books. Maybe it would be easier to enjoy more media if everything I tried to watch didn’t look as white as the walls of my apartment.”
When Dora receives a letter from the immigration service in Canada saying she will be deported soon, as her visa is expiring, a friend suggests she marry a woman. Since she doesn’t currently have a girlfriend, faking a relationship might be her only option since she can’t muster the desire to return to school for advanced photograph studies.
Abby is a reserved librarian who seems enthusiastic about helping with the marriage plan. As the two girls get to know each other through dates in snowy Toronto and meeting Abby’s family for Christmas, Dora starts to wonder how much of this relationship they are faking and how much is real.
If there's something I can tell you is that I can always count on M. Hollis to write adorable, heart-warming, sapphic stories with interesting characters and plots. The idea for this book is definitely what made me interested in it in the first place. It's an own voices book about a lesbian, Brazilian girl who is an aspiring photographer. She moves to Canada to pursue a new life but when her visa expires she has to find a new way to stay in the country. After analyzing a lot of options she encounters her coworker's best friend, Abby, who is a pansexual librarian and who wants to marry Dora to help her stay in the country. They start hanging out so they can learn about each other before they officially marry and they even spend Christmas at Abby's place with her family, faking a relationship.
This is a gorgeously written book. As I said, I always love how M. Hollis constructs cute and interesting f/f relationships. I love how she isn't afraid to write harrowing and challenging situations in the middle of her fluffiness and how the resolutions aren't always what you expect them to be. I think this book in particular is written from such a personal place for her and I could feel that through the pages. I appreciated what she had to say about the topics that were touched here. I also felt that she held these characters close to her heart and that she wrote them with a lot of love and care. I adore the awkwardness that they had at the beginning and how realistic it felt when they didn't know what to say to each other but also the slow progression into a friendship and then a relationship.
The problem that I had with this novella is one that I had with her other books as well and that's that they're too short. In this one, I couldn't fall completely in love with the relationship because we didn't see a lot of it. We were supposed to know that they were talking and getting close but it was all in a montage rather than a deep descriptions of feelings and that's just a preference but I like to see the falling in love part more than the beginning and the resolution. I didn't mind very much because I knew going in that it was a novella, but I still was left wanting more. I would have liked to see more from Abby as well since I liked her character a lot because of the dichotomies of being shy but also super upfront when needed. Overall, this was a very beautiful story and I adored seeing what we got from their relationship. I would definitely recommend this if you're looking for something soft, fluffy and easy to read!
