The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren
Publication Date: May 14, 2019 by Gallery Books
ISBN: 9781501128035
432 pages
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐
Thank you to Gallery Books and Netgalley for allowing me to read this in exchange for an honest review.
Olive is always unlucky: in her career, in love, in…well, everything. Her identical twin sister Amy, on the other hand, is probably the luckiest person in the world. Her meet-cute with her fiancé is something out of a romantic comedy (gag) and she’s managed to finance her entire wedding by winning a series of Internet contests (double gag). Worst of all, she’s forcing Olive to spend the day with her sworn enemy, Ethan, who just happens to be the best man.
Olive braces herself to get through 24 hours of wedding hell before she can return to her comfortable, unlucky life. But when the entire wedding party gets food poisoning from eating bad shellfish, the only people who aren’t affected are Olive and Ethan. And now there’s an all-expenses-paid honeymoon in Hawaii up for grabs.
Putting their mutual hatred aside for the sake of a free vacation, Olive and Ethan head for paradise, determined to avoid each other at all costs. But when Olive runs into her future boss, the little white lie she tells him is suddenly at risk to become a whole lot bigger. She and Ethan now have to pretend to be loving newlyweds, and her luck seems worse than ever. But the weird thing is that she doesn’t mind playing pretend. In fact, she feels kind of… lucky.
I cannot and will not stop reading romance for as long as I live. It has quickly become one of my favorite genres to read. It’s hard for me to pick up anything else. When I got accepted to read this on Netgalley I almost cried. I have been seeing so many rave reviews, and it had such good ratings. I downloaded it and read it immediately!
Olive and Ethan are obviously in a hate to love relationship. They bond over their free fake honeymoon that Olive’s sister, Ami, was supposed to take with her new husband, Dane *barf.* I’m so happy that this exists. It’s a book that I would read whether I was into romance novels or not. The synopsis is just perfect.
I honestly relate to Olive in the sense that we have the worst luck. It’s not enough to ruin your life, but it’s enough to make you go crazy. This book entered my life at the perfect time. It gave me a fictional character to connect with. I thought that the job she wanted was actually quite interesting, but not worth it when your boss is a total jerk. I felt bad for her toward the end of the book.
Ethan is almost my fictional true love, but Aragorn from The Lord of the Rings pushes him into second place. Pike from Birthday Girl by Penelope Douglas is my third true love. Anyway, Ethan is just a trooper, but also very annoying sometimes. I don’t want to spoil, but he believes his dumb brother about something specific, and I wanted to SCREAM the entire time. He does help Olive along the way, and she helps him. He does hurt her a couple of times, but he makes up for it. I feel like his character could have gone two different ways, and I am happy with how they developed him.
The writing of this novel was pretty good. It was actually quite basic, but I thought it was really witty. I actually laughed out loud quite a few times. It takes a lot to get me to feel actual physical emotion while reading a novel. I tried hard not to show it while I was in the break room at work. The moral of the story is: DON’T LIE. It’s just not worth it. Thank you, and goodnight.
My only gripe is that is probably too long for what it is. There is some unnecessary drama that was supposed to keep the story going. It felt like they could have went about it a different way. I still really enjoyed it though, and it’s definitely a page turner.
I highly recommend it, and I will definitely buy it when it comes out. The cover is beautiful.
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