Review: The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren

Synopsis from Goodreads:

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.

I received a copy of this title via NetGalley. It does not impact my review.

The Unhoneymooners will be available May 14, 2019. 

This book was so fun! The Unhoneymooners is definitely among my favorite of Christina Lauren’s books and I know it’s one I’ll be re-reading in the future.

I absolutely loved the banter between Olive and Ethan. There was also a lot of humor surrounding Olive’s very large, very involved family. I was smiling a lot while reading this book. I also loved that the story employed two of my favorite tropes: Hate-to-Love and Fake Relationship. I enjoyed watching their relationship change as they got to know each other better and the awkward moments as they pretended to be a couple.

Both main characters were likable and I shipped them together. That said, Olive was frustrating at times. She had communication issues and she jumped to conclusions pretty easily. I also thought she was a little too stubborn on things she shouldn’t have been. One of the big obstacles between Olive and Ethan comes from them disagreeing about Ethan’s brother’s (who is also Olive’s new brother-in-law) behavior. The fact that Ethan would give his brother the benefit of the doubt instead of automatically agreeing with Olive seemed a reasonable response from his character and her treating it like such a betrayal seemed a little over the top.

Speaking of Ethan, I wish we would’ve gotten more from his point of view (we only get one chapter at the end). I went into this expecting it to be dual POVs, so it took me a little while to get over that, but I did ultimately enjoy Olive’s POV, so it still worked for me.

Overall, I really enjoyed The Unhoneymooners. I loved the banter and the fake relationship situations and the romance (though there are a few scenes a little more graphic than I prefer). This is a perfect read for somebody in a real Rom-Com type of mood and I definitely recommend it.

Overall Rating (out of 5): 4 Stars