Posts Tagged: Romantic Comedy

I received this book for free from Gallery Books in exchange for an honest review. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.

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.

I am not entirely sure what I expected diving into The Unhoneymooners but I ended up absolutely loving it. Christina Lauren’s books are extremely hyped but I never felt a particular need to read them until I saw the synopsis for The Unhoneymooners. My general distrust of hype made me worry I’d end up not liking the book, especially because I had just DNF’d another hate-to-love romance. INSTEAD, I was cackling and swooning and generally having a great time. 

Olive and Ami may be identical twins but are opposites in every other way. Ami is the lucky twin whereas Olive can never seem to catch a break. When, at Ami’s wedding, everyone but Olive (and the bridegroom’s brother, who she hates) gets extreme food poisoning from eating bad seafood, it seems like Olive’s luck might be beginning to turn. Ami pushes Olive into going on her honeymoon and soon, Olive finds herself in very close quarters with a man she thought she hated?

So, I am pretty nit-picky about hate-to-love romance because I always find that they aren’t as intensely hate-to-love as I want them to be, and in many of the cases, the hate is founded on very shaky grounds. While the romance here isn’t as intense as I like my hate-to-loves, Olive and Ethan’s misunderstandings and their dislike of one another made sense.

There is definitely a bit of instalove happening but Christina Lauren writes Ethan and Olive’s interactions so well, and paces them out so well that it makes sense that they fall out of dislike and fall into like pretty quickly. For all the misunderstandings that surround their dislike for one another, once they are put together, alone and in the same room, they get pretty good at communicating their emotions to one another. I loved seeing Ethan and Olive have honest conversations about their feelings. 

My biggest issue with this book is that I felt like the conflict resolution wasn’t satisfying at all?? I could sense the conflict coming from miles away but felt like we needed better explanations and apologies for what went down. People mess up sometimes and that’s valid but having it wrapped up, in the book with a, “oh i decide to forgive him” after being mad for a while was jarring to read and felt like bad writing. 

I will say that given the number of coincidences that happen in this book, it might not be the best read for people who have a harder time letting go of disbelief but I found that it made the book feel very rom-com-y and I enjoyed that. It also makes me wonder what else I’ve been missing out on by Christina Lauren because of my fear of hype. 

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