Thanks for the review copy. I think a younger audience will enjoy this more than I did. I liked the scavenger hunt parts the best.

Thank you so much to NetGalley, St. Martin’s press | Wednesday Books and author Raegan Revord for providing me with the eARC of “Rules for Fake Girlfriends”, in exchange for my honest review.
Publication date: September 2nd, 2025
Reviewed on Goodreads: June 28th, 2025

This is one of my most anticipated releases of 2025! I am so thrilled to have gotten the opportunity to read and review it early!

“Rules for Fake Girlfriends” is/has:
- Young Adult romance
- Sapphic romance
- Trans representation
- Nonbinary representation
- Mental health representation
- Fake-dating Trope
- Grief/trauma healing
- Found Family

Avery is a college freshman who has recently lost her mother. After her mother’s passing, she decides to move from New York to Brighton, England, to attend University. She is also searching for something she believes her mother left for her.
Charlie is a girl also attending the same university. When Charlie and Avery under awkward circumstances, they have to pretend to be girlfriends.

As the two work together to solve the scavenger hunt, and connect with new people along the way, the lines between real and fake girlfriends start to blur, and they find themselves falling for each other. That is, until things get secretive, and trust starts to fade.

This was a pretty fun read.
Each chapter is based on a different “rule” of a rom-com, and those rules guide the storyline, which I thought was a cool idea.
I liked hearing about Avery’s struggle with grief after losing her mother, and how it affected her family relationships. I think it was nice to see different forms of grieving/trauma response showcased.
I also really liked Avery’s friend group, and the way that she was able to find her people and make a little family, even after moving to a new country. I thought each of the side characters were pretty well developed and had an important place in the story.
Finally, I thought Avery and Charlie had a cute relationship. I wish that it was a bit more developed, and that we saw a bit more romance between the two, but the story was more focused towards Avery and the scavenger hunt + healing from her recent loss (which is not a bad thing, I just was expecting more romance).

Overall, it is quite a nice book! I wouldn’t call it a very lighthearted read, since it deals with some serious things- but certainly would recommend it.

It was really good I really enjoyed the story and the characters. It is out the the genres I usually read but I really had a fun time and enjoyed it

The set up and characters of this one were very sweet, and honestly a very cute debut novel from Revord, (who is only 17???!?). I do think that it would have benefitted from a seasoned editor or another draft, as a few strings of the plot just kind of... disappeared? But overall, it was an enjoyable time.

Rules for Fake Girlfriends has a heartfelt premise that immediately caught my attention—a grieving teen following a scavenger hunt left behind by her late mother? That emotional hook had the potential to deliver something really special.

While the story started strong, I found myself wishing the scavenger hunt had remained the central focus. Instead, the narrative shifted more heavily toward the romance, which, though sweet at times, didn’t fully land for me as the heart of the story.

That said, the characters were a standout—especially Conor, who brought a lot of charm and heart to the page. There’s clear potential in Raegan Revord’s writing, and it’s especially impressive considering this is her debut. I’m genuinely looking forward to seeing how her voice grows in future books.

A solid debut with a lot of promise. I’d recommend it to readers who enjoy contemporary YA with grief elements and a budding romance.

DNF @ 50%

Avery's mom died a few months ago, and she was originally planning on going to Columbia, but she decides instead to go to her mother's university in England for a year before transferring. She hopes that it will help her be able to feel closer with her mother, and understand a last message she left. On the train ride to her university, she meets a girl named Charlie who needs her to pretend to be her girlfriend to keep her from having to sit with her actual ex-girlfriend. Fate keeps throwing Avery and Charlie together, and they eventually decide to team up, with Charlie helping Avery with her mom's scavenger hunt in exchange for Avery continuing to pretend to be her girlfriend.

This book had a really strong start and likeable characters, but I had difficulty continuing the book around the middle. The pacing was confusing, with the plot sort of jumping around. Additionally, the author seemed to forget what had already happened in the book, with the side plot about the relationship with Avery's best friend being inconsistent about what had already happened. The reveal of the fake relationship to Maddi also happened twice, which didn't make much sense. Maddi also had inconsistent pronouns used for them, both they and she, with no explanation that they used both pronouns. There was an additional issue where a boy talks about how he uses both a cane and a wheelchair because of having Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, but he doesn't explain why. It could have been as simple as "my mobility issues are worse on some days", or something like that. I myself have Ehlers Danlos syndrome and have used both a cane and a wheelchair over the course of my life, so I was excited that there was a character with the disease, but it wasn't written well.

Overall, the book was just too confusing and inconsistent for me to continue. I'm hoping these issues are resolved in the final version of the book.

My thanks to Netgalley and Wednesday Books for providing me with a digital copy for review.

I really liked how this book started. I liked our main character Avery and I liked the set-up. The atmosphere was really cool and the mystery/plot of the story was set up nicely. The meet-cute between Avery and Charlie was cute and I was invested in the romance. However, as the story progressed, I found myself less and less invested in the romance. I didn't feel as though Avery and Charlie had much chemistry, and there wasn't a whole lot of 'screen time' between them. I felt like Avery spent a lot of her time with her roommate and other friends rather than Charlie. They fell in love just a little too quickly, and the ending wrapped up a bit too nicely and quickly for me, especially the plot between Avery and her dad. Her dad was going through a lot of grief over the death of his wife, and as such he was spiraling in his depression. All it took was one phone call to her friend's mom and all of a sudden he is much better, getting the help he needs, and is willing to talk to Avery again. I wish that he and Avery could have had a heartfelt conversation about her mom, and that she could've shared her feelings with him.

But overall, it was a cute rom-com that I think the target audience (young adults) will eat up. This book has promise, as does the author, and I would be interested in seeing more works in the future.

What a fun story!! It’d be the perfect one to read with a group of girlfriends and discuss. Loved the characters and the setting.

This is one I wanted to like a lot more than I did. The premise is amazing. Avery moves to England for her first year of college to fulfill her mother’s wishes who passed months before. She learns to make new friends, reconnect with old ones, and goes on a sprawling scavenger hunt that her mother left for her.

Along the way she keeps bumping into Charlie who feels weird seeing her ex all of the time and proposes a fake dating scheme to Avery that gets out of control. Each chapter title is a reference to a classic romcom trope and follows a very self aware outline of your traditional rom com.

Unfortunately this didn’t work for me. I felt like there was too much going on in the book so I was never really convinced that Avery and Charlie should be together. I found Avery’s friendships much more interesting and wished that had been the focus of the book (though it kind of was if you consider page time). It just wasn’t a convincing romance.

However if you know that going in, it’s definitely a fun read. This is the authors debut novel and I’ll definitely be reading more of their work!

When Avery Blackwell receives a postcard from her recently deceased mother, she decides to take a leap, leave New York, and enroll at her mother’s alma mater, the University of Brighton. Traveling to England, she sets out on a scavenger hunt her mother laid out before Avery was born. But on the train from London to Brighton, a girl named Charlie asks Avery to pose as her girlfriend for a couple minutes to try to make an ex jealous. Coincidences compound, minutes turn into months of fake dating and then, maybe, something real, until Avery discovers that Charlie is hiding a secret of her own.

All in all, Rules For Fake Girlfriends had plenty of potential. The idea for the story was good. In fact, there were several good ideas there, which is really where things started to go wrong. Yes, the books needs copy editing to address inconsistent descriptions of characters and genders (one character seems to switch inconsistently between she/her and they/them with no explanation). But more than that, it has issues with structure, pacing, and plot. Is it a romance between Avery and Charlie, is it about Avery learning about her mother and in the process learning lessons about herself, is it about Avery finding a community of friendsthat serves as a found family, is it about Avery reconnecting with her father after the trauma of her mother’s death…it tries to be all of these inequal parts, and in doing so, doesn’t really give fully adequate weight to any of them. There also seem to be some moderately significant things that happen off-page, which we really should have been shown.

With all that said, it was nevertheless a reasonably enjoyable book. For me it was probably about 2-½ stars, which on my scale is certainly enough to consider reading more from the author. Given that it’s a debut novel from a teenage author, I’m inclined to be generous and round it up to 3 stars.

I really enjoy how this book leaned into the rom-com of it all with the titles. Sometimes, I can be a bit of an Avery about romance novels, rolling my eyes at the overindulgence and fantasy of it all, but the humor and self-awareness of this book and how it was structured put me at ease and allowed me to just enjoy the ride. This was such a fun romp along the British coastline. I enjoyed the various representation in the novel, particularly the representation of trans and disabled characters who felt like real and authentic, full characters rather than heavy-handed virtue-signaling. The ending wrapped up a bit quickly for my taste, and I would have liked the project swap to have played a larger role in their reunion, but otherwise, this book was a gem.

Avery decides to move to Brighton where her mother went to college in an effort to complete a scavenger hunt she'd left for her and shortly upon getting there she meets Charlie, a girl she decides to pretend to be a fake girlfriend for.

This book really disappointed me. It started out very strong, I was intrigued by the scavenger hunt, Avery's relationship with both her father and her late mother and how the whole fake dating thing was going to go. The pacing just felt so off though. Things would be repeated like one chapter later, or things would be contradictory where like for example Avery said she texted her best friend to visit but then that was never addressed again. The next convo her friend asked about meeting for lunch. Also at one point Avery was worried about what Charlie would think about something she'd done but they'd already seen each other since that happened so it felt very delayed and confusing.

I didn't let this part affect my review score because it could change in the published copy but I felt it was worth noting, there's some issues with pronoun usage that felt very clunky. Avery's roommate Maddi was misgendered multiple times when it was clear that they only used they/them pronouns. There were also several typos throughout the entire book.

Another thing I did like was the effort to be inclusive. I liked that there was a trans character, a couple nonbinary characters, of course lesbian characters, a character with ehlers danlos syndrome. Seeing people deal with different things not often shown was appreciated.

Thank you to St. Martin's Press, Wednesday Books and NetGalley for the ARC to review.

This is my first book by this author and i absolutely loved it! Great flow, character development. I just wanted to keep reading it! Thanks for the ARC!

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I wanted to love this so much, and while it did have a few squeal-worthy moments, overall it was a little forgettable to me. the tone is very juvenile—more high school than college vibes (which I guess is fair since the characters are freshmen)—and a large portion of the book felt very low stakes and awkwardly paced. I liked the idea of the scavenger hunt, but I didn't find the clues super engaging. I didn't really feel strong chemistry between Avery and Charlie even though they supposedly fake dated so well even Maddi believed them. And I still can't believe we never got a scene at the college's dining hall—the amount of food they bought off campus felt SO out of touch; there's no way I would've been able to afford so many pizza takeaways and trips to the cafe lol. UB has an Eat In scheme, so at least some mention of the hospitality program would've been appropriate... And while I loved all the scenes at the pier, there's never direct mention or description of the Lanes, which are super iconic to Brighton. If they were galavanting around the city trying to figure out the clues and such, it felt like the author should've localized it more. That said, I know the author is American, so maybe a little more research would've been helpful. Also, the Victoria & Albert Museum is free entry unless you're buying tickets for a specific exhibit?? Basically, there lots of moments where I had to suspend my disbelief and just roll with it.

What really made the book for me was the side characters. I loved Maddi and Colin (the EDS rep, woo!) and Rowan (even though she felt like a sudden addition and very one-dimensional) and Leyla. I wish we could've gotten more scenes with Esther, too. Someone that knew Halle really well and could've offered Avery stories about her mom's college experience... Also, when we first meet Esther, there's this whole "we were roommates, we were really, really good friends..." I thought for a second we were going to find out Halle was bi or something!!! which would've been EPIC. Alas, my queer dreams were not to be. It would've been such a unique and emotional way to further connect with her mom; what a missed opportunity...

All that said, I swear I DID have a good time reading it. I just feel like this book is more suited to younger teens, maybe 14-17, and I'm simply too old and critical to really enjoy it lol. Still a solid 3 out of 5 ⭐️s

I wanted to love this book but I ended up not loving it but not hating it either.

It was a cute concept but I would have liked the love interests to actually spend more time with each other.

But the scavenger hunt pulled at my heartstrings.

I want to start off by saying this was a cute debut and I teared up during the 3rd act breakup. The fake-dating plot was so fun, wholesome, and whimsical and I devoured this book. The banter was fantastic, and the main character being a rom-com lover herself makes the characters in on the trope silliness. The tropes were alluded to a bit in the chapter titles! Each chapter title mentioned a romcom rule (the rules for fake girlfriends) that were on-topic for the contents of that chapter. I can’t remember the last time chapter titles improved the reading experience to this degree. It was really well done! The A-plot of Avery and Charlie being fake girlfriends is A++. There was a lot of great representation in this book too, especially with the sapphic, nonbinary, and disabled characters.

Things that could have been better:
The scavenger hunt. I wish it had gotten developed more and had a bigger part in the story. The scavenger hunt is a big part of the synopsis and promo for this book but it’s an abandoned and forgotten about D plot. The plot as a whole gets really scattered in the middle, it suffered for trying to include too many things. Is the book about her fake dating relationship? Is it about navigating her new relationship with her father? Is it about leaving your hometown for the first time and growing apart from your best friend? Is it about trying to befriend and support your roommate who shows signs of depression? Avery and Charlie’s fake-dating romance was well executed but the side plots dealing with Avery’s scavenger hunt, grief-stricken father, bff, and roommate were all half-baked in comparison. I wish the book had been more focused on one or two side plots and really polished them up to perfection.

All in all, Rules for Fake Girlfriends has a great foundation and includes creative story ideas, but I wish it was better executed (and maybe it will be by its publication date in September). I'll definitely be interested in Revord's future work as they hone their craft and I think rom-com lovers will still adore Avery and Charlie's A-plot.

Rules for Fake Girlfriends is Raegan Revord’s debut novel, and I was lucky enough to receive an ARC from NetGalley. I had high hopes for this novel because Raegan is such a wonderful actress, but it definitely read like a debut novel. There are plenty of odd moments with grammar and punctuation, which I’m sure will be handled prior to release. What really threw me off was how unrealistic the scavenger hunt was, even with suspension of disbelief, I felt like it could have been made better. It felt as thought there should have been a mystical element, like maybe magic exists in few people and Avery’s mom was a witch, and that’s how she could make a scavenger hunt work after 25 years. Can’t wait to see more from Raegan Revord! #raeganrevord #netgalleyreview #bookreview

Thanks to NetGalley for an advanced readers copy (arc)

Dnf at 38%

TW: grief of a parent.

All though the book was enjoyable to pick up when I had nothing else to do it seemed to be super slow paced. I don’t think enough time was spent working on the character building because I really just didn’t care about the FMC enough to be intrigued while reading the book. The writing was good for a debut novel and I do want to try to read it again at some point. I’m a major mood reader, so that might be why it wasn’t easy to binge.

The romance seemed to be more of a subplot which I found to be strange because the main genre is supposed to be romance. The two girls were enjoyable characters but I didn’t know really anything about them. I’m sure if I finished the book I’d be able to connect with the two more and because of that I do want to read it again when it comes out.

The book reminded me a lot of the book Love and Gelato. Personally I liked love and gelato, but it’s similar to this book in the way that it’s hard to get into.

I’d recommend trying it out when the release day rolls around because it was fun to read. Also, keep in mind that I get distracted easily and the writing was easy to read, so it’s likely that this book could be your thing it just didn’t seem to be what I needed while I was reading it.

I am OBSESSED with this author and book! Sooooo good! I can't wait to read more from this author Thank you for the ARC!

I loved this book so much. For its softness. For its quiet strength. For how it captured that bittersweet mess of love, loss, and growing into yourself. It’s the kind of story that stays with you like a warm hand on your back.