Book Review (more just a pile of my personal opinions from my personal experiences)

Title: The Unhoneymooners

Author: Christina Lauren

Year: 2019

Genre: Romance, enemies to lovers

Queer shit: gay brother, nearly insignificant character so he felt kind of token-y

Vibe Check: twin sister and entire wedding party get food poisoning but honeymoon is non-refundable so this twin and the best man are sent on the trip instead, enemies to lovers

Pile of Opinions: Enemies to lovers is a tough one for me because if it’s not done well it feels abusive. This one was leaning into the bullying behavior and came across extremely annoying and immature. The story is about a twin sister who is the maid of honor in her twin’s wedding. The bride is big into giveaways and winning stuff so she ends up winning most of her wedding vendors (including a seafood buffet that gives the entire wedding, except our two leads, food poisoning) and the entire all expenses paid honeymoon. The maid of honor has a seafood allergy and the best man has an aversion to buffets so they are the only two wedding guests who do not get sick. The bride decides her twin sister should pretend to be her to redeem the non-refundable honeymoon and the groom tells his best man to pretend to be her new husband. It took me 150 pages before I felt like the book was readable for me. I enjoyed pages 150-300 because they were unpacking misunderstandings and spending time together on purpose and they had stopped bullying each other even if they didn’t quite admit to liking each other yet. I’ve liked other books by Christina Lauren so I pushed through to finish this one but I don’t think this was their best work. The plot was choppy and the last 100 pages felt like another book’s ending, like there were too many stories going on at once. I appreciate the story being layered and involving a large family so naturally there would be many stories, but by the time we got the happy ending it didn’t really feel that happy. I feel like this book leaned too far into the cliché of the trope and then swung too far the other way trying to add more plot and depth than a common romance and it didn’t feel like it fit. This book was a perfectly fine romance read if you like chaos and drama and don’t mind the enemies to lovers, I think this one was not for me. I didn’t hate it but It’s not going on my reread list personally. Feel free to share in the comments if you read this one and what you thought.