The Book:
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren
Published May 14th 2019 by Gallery Books
Date read: October 10, 2021
The Characters:
Twins Olive and Ami
Brothers Ethan and Dane
Buy it on Bookshop.org | Amazon
The Plot (from Goodreads):
Olive is always unlucky: in her career, in love, in…well, everything. Her identical twin sister Ami, 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.
The Review:
A little bit of a throwback here! I’m going to Hawaii for Christmas so I considered waiting until then to get a location-relevant picture of this book, but we all know I’ll forget.
I’m a huge fan of author duo Christina Lauren. I’ve been reading their books for years and years, starting with the Beautiful Bastard series, and my enjoyment of their novels has never decreased.
The Unhoneymooners starts with a hilarious opening scene–an entire 200 person wedding sick from a free seafood buffet–and continues to bring funny disaster until the last page. I loved the banter and snark between Olive and Ethan. They definitely had great chemistry, even when they were enemies.
I do think we missed out by not getting Ethan’s perspective in this book. C&L do dual perspectives in most of their books, so I’m surprised they decided not to in this case. I think the dual perspective works especially well in enemies-to-lovers tropes, since you get to see the misunderstandings that led to irrational hatred between the main characters. Ethan’s POV would have added a lot to the story, in my opinion.
Overall, this was a fun little end-of-summer escape that I’m sure all C&L fans will love!
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