Review: The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren

The Unhoneymooners
Christina Lauren
Release: May 14, 2019
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ARC provided by the publisher via Netgalley

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. 

Review:

Enemies to lovers ✔️
Forced cohabitation ✔️
Ridiculous TV movie-worthy coincidences ✔️

The Unhoneymooners is totally my catnip. I really enjoyed the unhoneymoon part of the story, but I just couldn’t love the book overall. Something about it bugged me.

There’s a disconnect between how Olive sees herself and how others see her that’s never really addressed: She’s very observant and she’s not usually wrong. (Except maybe about Ethan.) But that isn’t something her family and friends seem to know about her. They don’t believe her the one time she tries to tell them what she sees. It breaks my heart that they don’t value that quality in her and all the charm of the rest of the story isn’t quite enough to make up for it.

The fact that most of this happens toward the end of book only makes it worse. Even Ethan didn't really do enough to redeem himself after that. The rest of Olive's family certainly didn't. So when they get their Happy Ever After, I was much more frustrated than happy. I expect to have warm fuzzy feelings at the end of a Christina Lauren book so The Unhoneymooners was a bit disappointing.

   

3/5  stars

My reviews of other books by Christina Lauren:
My Favorite Half-Night Stand
Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating