What Are The Best Books With Fake Pregnancy Plots?

Yes! While many readers wish to devour the huge on-going series (also available on Kindle Unlimited), there are so many delightful, independent published and even smaller pub authors who nail the hockey world so beautifully as well. The romance authors such as Cathryn Fox, Teagan Hunter and Sara Ney publish huge hockey-themed romance series with lots of fake-dating, all centered around the hockey team of one of the main male heroes in each book of the series. While there can be some slight variations in how outlandish the premise of the fake-dating can get (ie: pretend to get engaged to help the heroine get her hands on an inheritance; pretend to be the heroine’s wife in order to help her get a visa to live in the hero’s country), the real meat of these wonderful books centers around the heartwarming, as well as many times humorous, hockey world. There are tons of books, with many 3+ book series about the individual heroes on the same team. So, while there can be many degrees of hotness in the many published hockey-themed romance books, as well as tons of sports-romance cliche’s galore (ie: why we love them in the first place), it’s so wonderful to be able to devour hundreds of pages of hockey-romance bliss for every season of the year.

Everyone in these comments gets my taste way too well lol. I swear I could sit here and talk books with you guys all night.

I’m very interested in the business aspect of Kindle Unlimited and how it has reshaped the way authors write within this particular genre. For many writers Kindle Unlimited has provided a sustainable income while other writers have been critical of the ‘formulaic’ writing that it encourages. As a reader Kindle Unlimited provides me with an almost endless choice of books to read, all for a flat monthly fee. However, I acknowledge that many of these books contain similar plots and it can take some digging to find the real standouts. As much as I wish there were more space in this commercial genre to let authors to express themselves creatively, I know that most writers have to strike a balance between what they want to write and what their readers expect. So, even though there’s a lot of repetition between books in this genre, it’s wonderful to be able to see an author’s growing style and increasing confidence over the long series of books that they write.

Yes, libraries are also very good at this because they carry both the more popular books as well as the specialty or harder to find titles. The staff often choose titles to feature and they are prominently displayed. Many of these titles are free to try and you can return them before you are done with the “best” book for you. Often libraries will carry the “mainstream” book on pregnancy such as “The Mayo Clinic Guide to a Healthy Pregnancy” as well as the more unusual titles like Mindful Pregnancy.

Manga fans may remember this scene from “Death Note” where Light Yagami stages his own death to mislead L, the main antagonist, in his investigation. But in reality, it was just a clever trick. Very different from other tropes where the death is the end of the story, this one is part of a cat-and-mouse game that’s extremely engaging and totally different from other Death scenarios.

Mine is, when both are equally powerful/unhinged/psycho etc

I realize that the setting of a birth can also be quite powerful in a story. Rather than a simple birth on a starship under attack, in a haunted castle, during a peace treaty, or on the run from the law, the external conflicts can add so much to the story of the birth. The one moment of vulnerability in the birth can be heightened by the dangers going on around the character in the story. A good writer can use the birth as the calm in the center of a hurricane. I think of a famous X-Files Mulder/Scully mpreg AU where Scully gives birth in a remote motel while government figures are searching for her and Mulder. It was a wonderful thrill of tension between the intimate and primal act of birth and the tense paranoid atmosphere of their lives. To find similar cross-genre stories, look for the mpreg keyword paired with words of other genres, such as 'Mpreg' + 'Adventure', 'Mpreg' + 'Horror', 'Mpreg' + 'Mystery'. Such pairing yields creative and gripping short stories which venture far beyond the domestic sphere of typical birth mpreg stories.

I've seen this one floating around on my feed. Algorithm tends to throw it at me now. Premise is a little too juicy for me to ignore, but overall it reads as somewhat too dramatic for my tastes (fake mating, ex's enemy, etc.). I gave the first few chapters a read simply out of curiosity, but the initial setup does read somewhat tense as the main character tries to avoid social disaster. Prose is readably simple, though the rest of the emotional developments follow fairly predictably from there. Trashy read that I couldn't look away from is the best way I'd describe this. It's not literature by any stretch of the imagination, but it's very Guilty Pleasure. Main draw to me is the exploration of power dynamics, and the author certainly gets a lot of mileage out of them. All in all, very trashy, very over-the-top, extremely fast-paced romantic drama. Just don't go in here expecting too much in terms of character development.

It was nice that the female lead had her own career and life outside of the romance. She wasn't just waiting around for some hockey star to save her. She worked in marketing or PR (I'm not really sure) and her career actually came into play during the story. I thought it was nice because she had something to gain from their fake dating arrangement from a professional standpoint. The female lead in the story had a career of her own outside of her romantic relationship. In this case, her career is in marketing or PR and her work at it played into the plot of the story and gave her a logical reason for her acceptance of the fake dating agreement from a career standpoint. Her active participation and the skills she brought to the table meant that there wasn’t an unfair power dynamic in the relationship. Too often in these types of stories the wealthy love interest has all of the power and the poor protagonist is along for the ride.

It’s possible to find more satisfactory stories in manga or manhwa. The contract marriage trope in Korean webtoons can lead to pseudo-swapping stories where a character enters into a contract marriage with one person but instead finds themselves falling for the other contracted person. Examples of such stories are A Business Proposal and Marry My Husband. Often such stories are told as comedic stories and can have a lot of dramatic irony when told as manga or manhwa. Each episode is very short and you can read as many as you want on official apps like Webtoon or Tapas. Although every story is set in a different cultural context, there is a lot of pressure to comply with family or social expectations. However, in the end, most of the contract marriages follow a certain formula: the two start out hating each other, then they accidentally have intimacy, then they develop jealousy, there’s a crisis, and in the end, they get married. If you can get into that formula, it’s really a fun way to read through a theme.