Nev's Reviews > The Love Con

3.5 - A fun romance to start off my reading in 2022! The Love Con follows Kenya as she’s competing on a cosplay competition TV show and gets herself into a fake dating situation with her best friend Cameron. I LOVE fake dating stories and while friends to lovers isn’t my favorite trope I felt like it really worked here. There was enough background information to make me understand their connection and why they’ve never gotten together before. I enjoyed the chemistry between Kenya and Cam.

I liked the backdrop of the cosplay competition show, it gave a lot of space for the author to explore microaggressions Black women and plus size women face in fandom spaces and in the world in general. Although, sometimes it felt like the descriptions of the costumes they were working on and how they were making things overtook the story. It was obviously important to the progression of the plot, but there were just too many details about things that didn’t feel completely necessary.

Also, not to sound like a smut fiend or anything… but this book’s sex scene was so underwhelming. Which surprised me since I really felt the building tension between the characters. While the scene itself wasn’t exactly fade to black, there was so little description it was like I blinked and it was over. So there wasn’t enough time for me to really feel the emotional or physical connection between the characters in that scene.