seriously romantic: a fare to remember by opal carew

i'd never read an opal carew book before, but when i read other people's reviews i realized that it's apparently her thing to have her books appear to be normal contemporary romances and turn out to be something unexpected. i'm pretty open-minded about the kind of romance books i read, i'm not one to go about clutching my pearls because "oh my, erotica or bdsm or threesomes or homosexuality or bisexuality." i have hard limits, like pedophilia and bestiality, for example, but i don't think those would surprise anyone.

but even though i'm open-minded, i also like to know what i'm getting myself into. and the blurb to a fare to remember barely touches what the actual romance is about. [n.b. i've noticed that the blurb has been updated on amazon to sort of hint of the actual story, but this was not the original blurb i read. the one i read actually had a different name for the main character and may have related to an earlier draft. but my point is still that i did not know what kind of book i was reading when i started reading it.] reid and stevie do have a one night stand, but then when they look to deepen their romance, reid's friend and business partner also falls for stevie and all of a sudden reid, stevie, and dylan are in a full-fledged ménage relationship. and no one is worrying about whose hands are where.

and it's kind of refreshing? so many of these ménage stories are really weird about incidental contact between the men, which never really makes sense to me, since they are basically having sex with the same woman and there's no way that works without touching. so i thought it was great that the guys were also into each other, even as they were also super into stevie. but i get that not everyone feels that way about this kind of thing, so if ménages or bisexuality are hard limits for you, then this isn't the book for you.

a fare to remember is also somewhat of an homage to an affair to remember, also known as my personal least favorite cary grant movie ever. i disagree with the ladies of sleepless in seattle (the one sort of homage to an affair to remember that i've actually ever liked).

which is to tell you that there is some high melodrama at the end of the novel that closely mirrors the story of an affair to remember and i was kicking myself for not realizing that of course this book was an homage to the movie. i didn't really pick that up at first even though i noted the title similarity. anyway, this was a quick, easy read. 

**a fare to remember will publish on april 4, 2017. i received an advance reader copy courtesy of netgalley/st. martin's press in exchange for my honest review.