[Book Review] The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren

 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.

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This was such a lovely enemies to lovers romance novel! This is my first Christina Lauren book, and  I know they (it's two co-authors, Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings) is kind of a icon in the romance genre so I was really excited to finally read one of their books. I think I picked a great first one. 

"I can appreciate my body in a bikini and still want to set fire to the patriarchy."

I really loved both characters, Olive & Ethan so incredibly much. Olive believes she's unlucky and often that can make her a bit pessimistic but as the story continues Ethan shows her that it is all about perspective and I thought that continuous theme was really sweet. Ethan is such a good love interest. He's intelligent, sarcastic, witty, and way more introspective than a lot of fictional romance love interests. I loved their bickering and "arguing" that was more often jokingly than anything. I think they had fantastic chemistry. When the reader sees both of them talk for the first time in the book their chemistry is glaringly obvious. 

The Maui part of the story (which I'd say is a little more than half) was honestly a lot of fun. We get some favorite tropes of money like "we are sleeping in the same room but oh no there's only one bed" or the trope where you take two characters who have some tension and put them in a competitive activity. I like that while they're sharing the room they go from "we will just do out own thing until the trip is over" to "what are we doing together today?" in such a natural and casual way. They grow to like each other's company and feel like doing something separately is almost wrong. It didn't feel forced for the plot and instead felt like they were just becoming friends. I think the flirty almost dangerous (they have to pretend to be married) vibe the Maui plot was saturated with made the story feel addictive. I honestly could not put it down and I started and finished it all in one day. 

Like I said earlier, one of the themes of this book is about perspective. Because of that, I want to explain why the drama at the end of the book involving Olive and Ethan specifically is why I cannot give the book a full five stars. I think I understood where the authors were trying to do. It's hard to know someone all your life, someone you love, and then find out that they've done some horrible thing. But I think the way Ethan not only handled the news, but the way he treated Olive made me really mad, mostly because it seemed a bit out of character. Also, I think that because most of the book is more or less this happy and sweet time and then right at the end unnecessary out of character drama happens between the couple. I get that there needed to be some sort of tension or drama to make the ending really grand but it just made me annoyed because it didn't need to happen. And I am not saying the drama between Ami (Olive's twin sister) and Dane (her husband) didn't need to happen because I think their confrontation was well done.  

I really like Christina Lauren's writing style. Sometimes when there is more than one writer on the same story you can tell where one person stopped reading and where the other began. But that wasn't the case for The Unhoneymooners. Their dialogue is really well written, the typical everyday and sexual tension is well done, and I have really nothing to say about the technicalities of the writing at all. Another thing I loved is the "fade-to-black" technique they used when it came to the sex scenes.They have a few sexy and flirty moments I loved, and that was good enough for me since I am not a huge fan of detailed sex scenes. 

Overall, I super recommend this book. Even with the issue I had with the story, I think this has easily become a favorite romance novel of mine. I need it for my collection so I can re-read it when I'm in the mood for a really good romance. Also, I think this book would make a fantastic movie. I am now interested in reading more of their romance books. 

Thanks for reading!