Let's Bust a Recap : The Unhoneymooners

I don't know if you can tell, but 2022 is officially the year I became a library user again. (Even though I still don't have my own library card.) Because I am now in a bona fide book club and my insistent appeals gentle requests to choose books from my unread shelf have gone unheeded by my book club friends, I have gotten very familiar with the online system of placing a book from the library on hold so that the nice library people (otherwise referred to by civilized human beings as "librarians") can find the book for me and have it ready at the counter to pick up when I go in. I'm sure you all have known this for years but it's a great system. I recommend libraries. 

But why am I babbling on about my fairly recent rediscovery of how great libraries are instead of getting on to the recap? Well, to be honest, The Unhoneymooners is holding on to my personal Worst Book of 2022 so far and I have very few positive things to say about it. Now that you know where I'm coming from, I guess we can get to it.

The Unhoneymooners written by the popular American duo Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings was published in 2019 which means it was one of the books I saw all over Instagram for the very short amount of time that I had an Instagram account. So when my book club chose it for April, I recognized it immediately. I was not aware, however, that "Christina Lauren" was actually two people, and I am very curious how their writing process works. According to wikipedia—the source of all knowledge on the internet—the pair met in 2009 while writing fanfiction online and became coauthors in 2010. They've written a whole scad of books together, a bunch of which have made it onto the New York Times Bestsellers list, The Unhoneymooners in particular spending fourteen weeks there. 

So the premise is that Olive—who is perpetually unlucky—ends up taking her identical twin sister's dream, all-expenses-paid honeymoon to Hawaii after the entire wedding gets violent food poisoning at the reception. The only catch is, she has to take it with her bitter nemesis—the groom's brother Ethan. The two of them somehow manage to avoid the intense illness because of allergies and a general disdain for open buffets. 

And you see where this is going, right? Classic enemies-to-lovers trope. Except the reason Olive and Ethan were "enemies" in the first place is laughably flimsy at best. Like, when they met, she was eating cheese curds and he had a weird facial expression. Really?

So anyways, they have to go on this romantic vacation together and pretend to be married because of strict rules which state the trip is absolutely non-transferable and blah blah blah. (Because Olive's perpetually lucky twin Amy won the trip in a contest.) This doesn't present a problem for Olive and Ethan...until they run into Olive's new boss. And then Ethan's ex-girlfriend. 

The premise was fun and the book had a pretty promising start (minus the weak Olive/Ethan enemy scenario we're given), but it fell apart quite rapidly for me. Olive gives it up way too quickly so any romantic build was practically non-existent, and the writing went from funny to banal before we even made it a third of the way through. Every male character turned out to be a total scumbag, and my entire book club agreed that the ending was just plain awful. 

On top of that, the way sex and marriage were treated so casually and the pervasive crass language were absolute dealbreakers for me. This one was a definite miss. I'll give it one point for Olive's large Mexican-American family dynamic, but I cannot and would not recommend The Unhoneymooners to anyone, and I won't be checking out any more books by Christina Lauren. 

Have you read anything by Christina Lauren? Do you have a favorite romance trope? I'll admit: I'm a sucker for the fake dating trope.