Mr and Mrs Fate by Athena Carstairs

Gideon Fate runs his company with an iron fist. Employees work long hours, and their mental health is on the decline. Thus, his board of directors has decided to step in and threaten to take Gideon’s job if he does not change his ways. Thus, Gideon’s assistant, Sarah, comes up with a plan to help save him and the company. She proposes that Gideon has a new lady in his life who is helping him change his ways. And to everyone’s surprise, Gideon names Artemis Henderson as the women who not only he is dating but he intends to marry to help save him and his company.

Artemis can’t understand why the CEO of the company picked her to enter into a fake relationship to save his company. If he had picked anyone, she would have thought it would be his assistant, Sarah. But as Artemis gets to know Gideon, she realizes the tough exterior is just a way to hide and protect himself from the world. And suddenly, Artemis finds herself falling for Gideon. But does he love her back? Is this just all business to him or could there be something more?

This fake dating/fake marriage romance was better than I thought it would be. I truly thought the characters would fall in love and the story end in a marriage at the last chapter. But that was not the case. The reader gets to see Gideon and Artemis struggle in their marriage for the second half of the novel and discovers each other’s faults and flaws and learn to navigate loving one another.

Also, the reader did get to see some real character development. That the characters didn’t change overnight and every time you thought Gideon was changing, the next day he’d go back to his old ways, but you understand it’s his fear and anxiety of change that causes this. But I liked that we also got to see Artemis’s flaws too. She’s stubborn and won’t back down from a fight and sometimes she can push Gideon before he is ready and when he lashes out, she lashes right back.

Although, I will say, this style of writing made the novel drag on for me. I felt like Gideon flipped flopped back and forth too much. Again, I did like the realistic human traits of growing and folding back into old ways, but this happened every chapter and it just got tiresome three-quarters of the way through. What I will say is, maybe I need to read more novels like this and learn to adjust to this type of writing. I’m so used to contemporary romances being quick and the characters drastically changing overnight, that characters taking a long time to development, at least in a novel, is new for me.

Additionally, the first half of the novel and the second half felt like two different stories almost. The first half we Gideon and Artemis butting heads and trying to assert dominance and every time we flip to the next chapter, time has passed exorbitantly, from days to months. Yet the second half, whole chapters are spent on just one day. I think the second half does spend too much time on one thing, however, I liked that we got to sit with the characters longer, rather than be rushed through their interactions like we are in the first half. The novel just lacked consistency on the pacing.

Mr. and Mrs. Fate is a realistic love story about learning to change and be vulnerable with another person, as well as be vulnerable with yourself. This novel is about learning to love and being open to receiving love from others. Mr. and Mrs. Fate is a 3.5 out 5 stars.