Description:

Review

The fake-dating plot is a well-worn device in contemporary romance, and on its surface B.K. Borison's Lovelight Farms appears to run the standard playbook: a financially desperate business owner tells a lie to win a contest, recruits her best friend to play the boyfriend, and discovers along the way that the performance was never really a performance at all. What distinguishes Borison's holiday romance from its genre siblings is not the premise but the surprising sophistication with which it interrogates its own central deception. The book argues, with more patience and structural care than a casual reader might expect from a Christmas-tree-farm romance, that the greater lie was never the one Stella Bloom told the contest judge. It was the decade-long campaign of self-deception she waged against her own heart, hiding evidence of mutual longing in a literal drawer full of cardboard pine-tree air fresheners while insisting to herself that the man who drove back at three in the morning because he "missed home" was only being friendly.

The novel's first and most consequential artistic decision is to make its protagonist a first-person narrator who tells the reader, from the opening pages, exactly what she feels. Stella Bloom has loved Luka Peters since she was twenty-one years old, since the day she wandered into a hardware store "lost in a shadow of grief" after her mother's death and he made her a grilled cheese sandwich. She narrates this history with clarity and self-deprecating humor, cataloging the evidence of Luka's attention while systematically refusing to interpret it. The dramatic irony is built into the narrative architecture itself: the reader watches Stella watch Luka being unmistakably in love with her, and watches her explain it all away. Borison's risk here is considerable. A narrator who knows her own feelings but cannot act on them risks frustrating the reader rather than earning sympathy, and the book's first third walks this line precariously. What saves it is the precision with which Borison roots Stella's paralysis in a specific, legible wound rather than generic romantic indecision. Stella's mother died young after her father's betrayal closed her heart; her father, Brian Milford, is an absent drunk who hosts a "fake Thanksgiving" and passes out into his mashed potatoes; and Stella has internalized the lesson that people leave. When Layla, Stella's best friend, presses her with the novel's diagnostic question—"Just because you let yourself love someone, doesn't mean they're going to leave"—Stella's private answer is the book's emotional thesis in miniature: "But it sure as hell doesn't mean they'll stay."

The fake-dating scheme, then, is not merely a plot mechanism. It is Stella's unconscious solution to an impossible equation: how to have Luka without risking losing him. If the relationship is pretend, it cannot fail, because it was never real to begin with. If Stella's heart gets broken, it will be the performance that ended, not the decade of accumulated intimacy that preceded it. Borison understands this logic and lets it drive the escalating physical and emotional intimacy without cheapening it. The practice kiss in the barn, the sleepy dry-humping when Luka crawls into her bed at three in the morning, the "trial week" they agree to—each step is narrated by Stella as an experiment whose findings she is careful not to trust. Yet the book's structure steadily overwhelms her defenses. The sabotage subplot, in which the town librarian Mr. Will Hewett is revealed to have spent a year degrading the farm's soil and canceling its orders because he wanted the land for an alpaca business, runs parallel to Stella's emotional sabotage of her own happiness. Hewett pursued his dream through concealment and indirection rather than asking plainly, and when Stella confronts him she says, with an exasperation that might just as well be directed at herself, that she would have happily given him space if only he had asked. The parallel is deliberate even if Stella cannot see it.

The novel's most effective formal device is the cardboard pine-tree air freshener, a recurring object motif that compresses nearly a decade of unspoken devotion into a single physical, countable thing. Luka has been buying them in bulk and giving her one at a time since they were twenty-one. Stella has been saving every single one, stuffing them into a drawer until they overflow into a closet box that, when she finally dumps it out in the climactic reconciliation scene, "smells like pine." The book's climax is driven entirely by callback rather than new information—no revelation, no misunderstanding cleared up, just Stella finally letting the accumulated physical evidence of Luka's constancy speak louder than her fear. When he slides a fresh one across her kitchen table after returning to her porch to apologize, and she answers by showing him the hundreds she has secretly saved, the moment earns its emotional weight because the object has been doing quiet work in the background of nearly every chapter.

The supporting cast does more than fill out the small-town ensemble-comedy quota. Beckett, the lead farmer with tattoo sleeves and a stoic demeanor, secretly adopts a mother cat and three kittens named Prancer, Comet, Cupid, and Vixen, and when Stella finally confesses the farm's dire finances he responds not with anger but with a full partnership proposal and a self-imposed pay cut. "This is what partners do," he says, and the line lands because it echoes Luka's earlier "this is what partners do" during a kitchen slow-dance where he tells Stella that leaning on other people does not make her achievements any less hers. Layla functions as the book's diagnostician, a gentle but persistent voice who reframes Stella's blindness as chosen comfort—"You're comfortable in the friend zone"—and presses the question that will not leave Stella alone: "Are you willing to be honest?" Sheriff Dane Jones, Stella's de facto father figure since childhood, issues a shotgun-wielding warning to Luka that reads as both small-town comedy and a genuine transmission of protective love from a community that has raised Stella more attentively than her biological father ever did. And Carina Peters, Luka's Italian mother, arrives with Tupperware and an interrogation that becomes a tender conversation about Luka's late father Leo, whose epilogue-framing advice—"Continue. Listen. You'll find your way"—provides the novel's ethical counterweight to Stella's paralysis.

Evelyn St. James, the travel-influencer contest judge, earns her place in the thematic architecture by functioning as the truth-teller whose documentary footage externalizes what Stella has refused to see. Evelyn arrives already knowing the relationship is fake—the town betting pool on Stella and Luka has been running for years, and Inglewild's busybodies are as efficient as they are nosy—and she must disqualify Stella from the contest after the confession. But before she leaves, she plays Stella a video montage of Luka's unguarded moments: his glowing look after a kiss, his murmured "She's amazing and she doesn't even know it." The footage is the novel's mise en abyme, its argument turned into evidence the protagonist cannot narrate her way around. Evelyn's line—"You think you've been lying to me, but you've just been lying to yourself this whole time"—is the book's thesis stated plainly, and it works because the preceding twenty chapters have been building the case.

The novel does not, however, entirely escape the gravitational pull of its genre's conventions, and Borison's comfort with those conventions sometimes becomes a limitation. The sabotage subplot resolves with a confession that feels rushed, a single scene where Hewett is caught hiding in a ditch and explains his motives in a block of exposition that does not quite earn the year of methodical destruction it purports to explain. The financial stakes—the $100,000 contest, the farm's debt, the partnership proposal with its 30–40% pay cuts—are established with specificity and then largely set aside once the emotional climax takes over, leaving the reader uncertain whether the farm is actually solvent or merely symbolically saved by love. The book's prose is competent and occasionally lovely—Stella's description of her love for "this in-between fall and winter... when the past intermingles with the present and flirts with the future" is genuinely evocative—but it can also lean heavily on the self-deprecating-chick-lit register, with Stella's "haunted Victorian doll" self-assessments and the banter's occasional straining for cuteness. These are not fatal flaws in a holiday romance, but they mark the distance between a book that executes its genre well and one that transcends it.

Where Lovelight Farms achieves something genuinely interesting is in its Epilogue. After twenty-two chapters of Stella's first-person narration, Borison switches to Luka's point of view, and the effect is to retroactively reframe the entire preceding narrative. Luka reveals he "didn't have" an exit strategy, that his agreement to fake-date Stella was never temporary in his mind, that the Delaware job he announced the morning after they first made love was never a departure but a move closer—a long-game wear-down he had been patiently running for years. His father's advice, recalled from an ice cream shop after young Luka punched a bully and was told to simply continue forward, listening, trusting that he would find his way, becomes the book's governing ethic: patient persistence over the grand gesture, love as accumulation rather than declaration. The switch is a formal gamble. Giving the male lead the final word in a romance narrated entirely by the female protagonist risks undercutting her hard-won agency. But Borison pulls it off because Luka's voice does not override Stella's; it completes it, filling in the half of the evidence she has been cataloging without believing. The book does not end with a wedding or a grand gesture but with Luka contentedly in bed beside Stella, ready simply to "continue." It is a quiet, earned ending that refuses the genre's louder impulses.

The book situates itself knowingly within the Hallmark holiday-romance tradition—Stella explicitly complains that she feels "lied to... by every Hallmark movie I've ever seen"—and much of its pleasure comes from watching it inhabit those tropes while gently rebuking them. The small town where everyone knows everyone's business, the first-snow kiss, the happy ending, are all present, but they are earned through emotional work rather than magical thinking. The friends-to-lovers lineage is equally claimed and complicated: Stella invokes the language of fate and kismet, imagining her dead mother "delivered you to me," but she also insists she does not believe in destiny, and the novel's mechanism for bringing the couple together is not cosmic intervention but two people slowly, painfully choosing to stop lying to themselves. The book's most unexpected intellectual debt is to the Transcendentalist tradition, invoked directly when Hewett quotes Thoreau—"It is better to have your head in the clouds, and know where you are, than to breathe the clearer atmosphere below them, and think you are in paradise"—and countered by the novel's communal, chosen-family resolution. The farm's salvation comes not from self-reliant individualism but from partnership, from shared burden, from the very leaning on others that Stella has spent the entire book resisting. Leo Peters's "Continue. Listen. You'll find your way" offers a different kind of practical wisdom: right action through patient persistence amid uncertainty rather than through solitary clarity.

What Lovelight Farms gets right, and what makes it more than a disposable holiday diversion, is its insistence that the obstacle between Stella and happiness is not ignorance but courage. The book holds, from its opening pages through its Epilogue, that Stella always knew. She saw Luka's love and she felt her own; she simply could not bring herself to trust the evidence because everyone who was supposed to stay had left. The novel's project is not to teach Stella something new but to dismantle the defenses that keep her from acting on what she already knows. This is quieter work than the misunderstandings and grand revelations that drive lesser romances, and Borison's willingness to commit to it—to let the climax turn on a closet full of cardboard pine trees rather than a new piece of information—is the mark of a writer who trusts her readers to follow emotional logic rather than plot mechanics. The book is for readers who want their holiday romance to come with a credible theory of why love is terrifying and why it is worth the terror anyway. It will frustrate those looking for the friction of genuine enemies-to-lovers or the sharpness of a satirical take on the Hallmark formula, but for anyone who has ever talked themselves out of wanting what they most want, Stella Bloom's long, halting journey toward saying "I love you" to a man who has been saying it back with cardboard pine trees for a decade will feel less like fiction than like a mirror held up at a generous angle.