Rules for Fake Girlfriends

“Rules for Fake Girlfriends” by Raegan Revord follows main character Avery Blackwell as she decides to change plans for her freshman year of college after her mother’s passing. She chooses to follow a scavenger hunt her mother put together when she lived in a seaside English town. When she arrives in England, she meets Charlie, and it turns out that Charlie’s mother knew Avery’s mother once upon a time before Avery’s parents got married. When Charlie asks Avery to help her make her ex jealous, Avery finds herself in the middle of something new—not only bringing to the surface feelings for someone else, but for another girl.

Besides Charlie, Avery befriends her roommate and some other students, and she delves into her mother’s scavenger hunt, finding clue after clue, looking for more of a connection with her mother, and hopefully even with her father. While he’s still alive, he has withdrawn from her and become distant, despite wanting her to stay closer to home. Avery’s time away feels like something she needs—and wants—especially as she longs to be closer to her mother despite the fact that she’s gone.

As she explores her new world, she loses some of the closeness she had with her childhood best friend, and she discovers that sometimes the past can be a key to the future, just as looking toward the future may help her better understand her past. Even though her world may be turned upside down at times by romance, uncertainty, and new discoveries, life is only what one makes of it, and Avery is certainly trying to make something more of hers as she takes the year to figure out not only who her mother was and what she left behind for Avery, but also who she is and why she matters in the grand scheme of things.