Any Trope but You by Victoria Lavine

Any Trope but You by Victoria Lavine
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for providing me with an advanced copy of this book in exchange for my honest review!
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A bestselling romance author flees to Alaska to reinvent herself and write her first murder mystery, but the rugged resort proprietor soon has her fearing she’s living in a rom-com plot instead in this earnestly spectacular debut by a stunning new voice.

Beloved romance author Margot Bradley has a dark secret: she doesn’t believe in Happily Ever Afters. Not for herself, not for her readers, and not even for her characters, for whom she secretly writes alternate endings that swap weddings and babies for divorce papers and the occasional slashed tire. When her Happily Never After document is hacked and released to the public, she finds herself canceled by her readers and dropped by her publisher.

Desperate to find a way to continue supporting her chronically ill sister, Savannah, Margot decides to trade meet-cutes for murder. The fictional kind. Probably. But when Savannah books Margot a six-week stay in a remote Alaskan resort to pen her first murder mystery, Margot finds herself running from a moose and leaping into the arms of the handsome proprietor, making her fear she’s just landed in a romance novel instead.

The last thing Dr. Forrest Wakefield ever expected was to leave his dream job as a cancer researcher to become a glorified bellhop. What he’s really doing at his family’s resort is caring for his stubborn, ailing father, and his puzzle-loving mind is slowly freezing over—until Margot shows up. But Forrest doesn’t have any room in his life for another person he could lose, especially one with a checkout date.

As long snowy nights and one unlikely trope after another draw Margot and Forrest together, they’ll each have to learn to overcome their fears and set their aside assumptions before Margot leaves—or risk becoming a Happily Never After story themselves.
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Oh, what to say about this book? I was very excited to get to read this ahead of print because the premise sounded so much fun. I am a huge romcom fan, and the idea of a book that was made up of all the tropes that contemporary romance fans loved sounded really promising. And there were a lot of things I really enjoyed about this book. The setting was great, and I really liked the sort of found family aspect that was touched on when Margot found herself in Alaska. And it was a good story. However, this wasn't the kind of book that I found myself rushing home from work to pick up and read before I did anything else, and I have to admit I set it aside a couple of times in order to read something else. That being said, I never considered DNFing it, and I was happy with the conclusion, so I would definitely recommend it to people who enjoy romance, and I do think that I will check out this author as she continues to write more in the future. It just maybe turns out that you can have too many tropes crammed into one book, and for me, it was not as much fun as I thought it was going to be.

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