What was once a love match between Lady Violet and Lord James Aubrey has become four years of polite conversation at breakfast and sleepless nights in separate bedrooms. Yet, when Violet receives word that her husband is unconscious after falling from a horse at their country estate she rushes to make sure he is well. When they meet up by accident at a country inn she realizes that he wouldn’t have told her he was well. She decides to get even in a scheme where she pretends to be ill just so he would know how he felt. When he catches on to her game he decides to see just how far she’ll take it.

When I read the synopsis I thought this sounded like a cute story. I like historical romances and an enemies to lover trope is always one of my favorites. To Have and To Hoax started off fun, but unlike Violet, I didn’t have to fake my approaching headache. Violet and James’s pettiness tried my patience pretty quickly.

To Have and To Hoax wasn’t all bad. The writing was very good, the side characters were really interesting, and the hero and heroine weren’t completely unlikeable. The game playing was just about 50 pages too long. I would’ve liked more chapters of the early days of their marriage so that I’d be more invested in them as a couple before they had their big argument. Unfortunately that was where the story started. It didn’t give me a lot of time to care and so I had little patience.

I tried very hard to not hold a fake illness against the author since this was written quite awhile before we got stuck in “quarantine” and took that into consideration in how this may have affected my enjoyment of this novel. I gave it a half star higher than I would’ve if I’d had the same feelings on a different day of reading this novel. ❤️❤️❤️❣️

I received a copy of this book through NetGalley for my honest review and it was honest!

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