Get your summer reading list ready for The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren! Olive and Ethan will sweep you off your feet!
Last week, I told you about The Bride Test, and this week, I’m bringing you another one of my fav reads of 2019!
The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren is a stand-alone contemporary romance that delivers all the things you like: frenemies-to-lovers, swoons, angst, and drunken declarations of feelings.
It’s better than $1.99 mai tais from Cheeseburger Maui. (Read the book. You’ll get it!)
{SPOILERS AHEAD!}
The novel starts out at Olive’s sister’s wedding. Ami has been planning this day for months, and she’s super cheap so she tries to get everything free. She mostly succeeds, too. Olive’s dress is tacky, but hey, it was free!
This also means the seafood buffet was free.
When the entire wedding party and attendees fall sick, except for Olive and Ethan (the groom’s brother), Ami decides Olive should take her honeymoon. Ethan also gets volunteered to go by his brother, Dean.
The stage has been set!
One of my favorite things about this novel was how the story builds. It’s not an insta-love. Ethan and Olive haven’t really gotten along since the first time they met, but as time passes between them in Hawaii, the honeymoon seems to turn a bit real. Once they start communicating, they figure out they don’t actually hate each other at all!
There’s lots of teasing and witty banter. Several laugh-out-loud mixups, messy exes, and angst…
You see, Ethan lets a secret about his brother (Olive’s new brother-in-law) slip. Dean hasn’t been faithful to Olive’s sister, Ami, during their relationship…
I KNOW.
Where the novel falters, for me, is Ethan after we get home. It’s not bad writing either. I simply didn’t want Olive to end up with Ethan after the things he said to her. Yeah, it was drama and angst, courtesy of Ethan’s asshole brother, Dean, but he said some awful stuff to Olive. I wasn’t forgiving at all. In the end, the authors really brought it to a point where I believed the reunion. Ethan’s grand gesture made me smile so big! And I guess he’s okay after all. One slip up, though! I swear.
At it’s heart, The Unhoneymooners is a story about family and how they come together for you when you’re at your lowest and help build you back up. Ami and Olive’s relationship felt so truthful and raw towards the end. I loved reading about their extended family and all their quirks, too.
Without a doubt, you need to read The Unhoneymooners! It’s the perfect blend of paradise romance meets grown-up relationship.
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.
Thank you to Gallery Books for the advanced copy of this wonderful novel!