Book Review: The Unhoneymooners

Author: Christina Lauren

Genre: Romance

Publisher: Gallery Books

Published: May 14, 2019

Pages: 400

Format: eBook

★★★★☆

This book is perfect for those that like: enemies to lovers, UST, and family secrets. 

You might not like this book if you aren’t into: vacation fraud or cheating storylines.

Christina Lauren is one of my auto-read authors. I pretty much buy or check out every book of theirs and am hardly ever disappointed. Even the stories that aren’t really my jam are always fun reads. That being said, I wasn’t super sold on their latest, The Unhoneymooners. I thought it was going to be 400 pages of vacation antics, with a few lies that get revealed, all leading to love. Boy, was I wrong.

I should have known better, honestly. These types of books are EXACTLY WHY I love Christina Lauren so much and why they are one of my Auto-Read Authors. They can take the most basic of tropes, knock them over, add a few twists and turns, and make the whole thing feel fresh. Each time I read one of their books I think, HOW ARE THEY THIS GOOD? 

The Unhoneymooners features a pair of identical twin sisters, Olive and Ami, who couldn’t be more different from each other. Ami, the “Lucky Sister” is engaged to a Bro Dude named Dane, has a great job, and wins at everything. No, literally. She wins almost every thing she enters, and in this case, has pretty much won her entire wedding and honeymoon through contests and giveaways. 

Olive, on the other hand, has had terrible luck her entire life. Her one claim to fame is getting stuck in one of those claw machines when she was six. Recently out of a job, her only goal at the moment is to survive her sister’s wedding. Then she’ll figure out the rest of her life.

The wedding approaches and has been planned to perfection, save the food poisoning that claims the entire wedding party, except Olive and Ethan, aka the Best Man, aka Dane’s older brother, aka Olive’s nemesis. 

Not one to lose out on a prize, Ami demands that Olive and Ethan take her and Dane’s all-expenses paid honeymoon to Hawaii. They both reluctantly agree, figuring that they can just go their separate ways once they arrive on the Island.

But they don’t.

Reader, this is where I thought they story would play out for the duration– in Hawaii. And we would get to see them gradually loosen up around one another until their true feelings surfaced and then, yay, Love. It would have been a great beach read, but probably forgettable the moment it was over. Christina Lauren gives us the gift of What Happens After? They let the vacation end and bring in real life and all that comes with it once the initial glamour wears off. I LOVE THIS SO MUCH.

Not to mention, they also give us a Mexican-American family in Olive and Ami. Y’ALL. As a person who is half Mexican-American and has more family than I probably even know about, I was SO HERE FOR THIS. Now, I don’t have 14 first cousins, nor did I grow up very close to all of my second cousins, but just displaying the affection and support Mexican American families give one other was tremendous.

In all fairness though, while I overall loved the book, I did have a few problems with a few things. I wasn’t a fan of the single point of view– a rareity in Christina Lauren books– and the ending wasn’t my favorite. It fit the characters well enough, but in the end, I want the big swoony ending. The one that’s almost a bit too much. 

Overall though, I enjoyed this book and will most likely read it again.