Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of longtime writing partners/besties Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the New York Times, USA Today and #1international bestselling authors of the Beautiful and the Wild Seasons series, My Favorite Half-Night Stand, Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating, Love and Other Words, Roomies, Dating You/Hating You, and Autoboyography. You can find them online at christinalaurenbooks.com, @ChristinaLauren on Instagram, or @ChristinaLauren on Twitter. You can find more of my reviews of Christina Lauren's works here.
Olive Torres is used to being the unlucky twin: from inexplicable mishaps to a recent layoff, her life seems to be almost comically jinxed. By contrast, her sister, Ami, is an eternal champion . . . she even managed to finance her entire wedding by winning a slew of contests. Unfortunately for Olive, the only thing worse than constant bad luck is having to spend the wedding day with the best man (and her nemesis), Ethan Thomas. Olive braces herself for wedding hell, determined to put on a brave face, but when the entire wedding party gets food poisoning, the only people who aren't affected are Olive and Ethan. Suddenly there's a free honeymoon up for grabs, and Olive will be damned if Ethan gets to enjoy paradise solo. Agreeing to a temporary truce, the pair head for Maui. After all, ten days of bliss are worth having to assume the role of loving newlyweds, right? But the weird thing is . . . Olive doesn't mind playing pretend. In fact, the more she pretends to be the luckiest woman alive, the more it feels like she might be. With Christina Lauren's "uniquely hilarious and touching voice" (Entertainment Weekly), The Unhoneymooners is a romantic comedy for anyone who has ever felt unlucky in love.
The first immediate thing I loved about The Unhoneymooners is how hilarious and genuine it is. A lot of romance novels can be hilarious in a kind of gimmicky or quirky way, but this one is genuinely laugh-out-loud funny. Part of this stems from the writing and jokes themselves—Olive is so relatable in her sarcasm and internal thoughts, and it's just difficult not to laugh at some of the things she says, does, or thinks. The other part of the comedy of this book is straight-up situational humor. Olive and Ethan are tossed into some pretty horrifyingly awkward situations—running into the boss on vacation and mass projectile vomiting to name a few—and the way these two characters act and react towards each other adds to the overall humor of the novel. I'd find it hard to believe if there was somewhere out there who read this without laughing or grinning at least once.
Enemies-to-lovers and fake dating? Sign me up! It's these tropes that most recently are taking the reading world by storm, and Christina Lauren combines them so effortlessly in The Unhoneymooners. Olive and Ethan are just strong characters on their own, but especially Olive, who we get to know intimately because the novel is from her point of view. Olive struggles with being the unlucky twin and currently with the job hunt, so when two perfect situations fall in her lap, it feels all too good to be true. And turns out, it is, because she has to spend the next few days with her nemesis Ethan, the brother of her sister's husband. Since he basically fat-shamed her, and can never look her in the eyes without a trace of disgust, Olive has been over it with trying to have a good relationship with him, but she'll suck it up if it means a free trip to Maui. This is your pretty classic enemies-to-lovers set up, but the way Christina Lauren delivers it makes the trope feel entirely fresh and newly-conceived, as if no one had ever thought of this set-up before. Combined with the fake-dating trope—or just lying around the people around them as if they're a newly-wed couple—both of these tropes feel refreshing as they play off of each other. Olive and Ethan didn't decide to fake-date to fake-date—rather, it was a situation where they lied once, and then kept having to live out the lie so that no one uncovers the truth. These perfectly combined tropes allows for some of my other favorite parts of contemporary romance to shine: the struggles and triumphs of the heroine's relationship with her family, Olive's job hunt and career desires, the representation of a curvier woman in contemporary romance, just to name a few.
Speaking of representation in contemporary romance, I thought the representation of a curvier woman in The Unhoneymooners was spot-on, and the entire genre is starting to catch onto this fact. Olive loves her body, and is not ashamed of her size or feeling as if she constantly needs to validate it to others. Her attitude surrounding her body made me feel seen, and that's a victory in my book. We're starting to see the publication of other romances with plus-sized or larger heroines (what immediately comes to mind is the Meant to Be series, with titles published by Julie Murphy and Jasmine Guillory). What contemporary romance will always do better than film is actually capture the reality and nuance of life. Christina Lauren captures it here, in The Unhoneymooners, for sure. Not only with Olive's size, but also with the pitfalls of corporate jobs because we live in a capitalist society, and what it means to come from a large, loud, loving Latinx family. Not all women are white and skinny, with small bodies and with perfect jobs and lives. In fact, most women are entirely the opposite, but they all deserve the same happily ever after. As I'm starting to see, the contemporary romance genre is picking up on this too, and it only makes me more excited about all the forthcoming titles to be released in 2022.
Other things I loved about The Unhoneymooners included its concept and execution. Just how hilarious is it that Olive and Ethan can go on this vacation because of food poisoning that affects the entire wedding party? How fun is it that we can actually see Olive's text messages with her family formatted as actual text bubbles within the novel? More importantly, I loved that feeling Christina Lauren creates near the ending—the one where it feels like the happily ever after is going to be just as fairytale-esque as we all want it to be. And then how that gets absolutely shredded once Olive and Ethan rejoin the real world. This, for me, was one of the most important aspects of the concept, and its execution was flawless. Of course we all want someone who will love us while we're relaxed and on vacation, but we want someone who will love us more during the hardest points in our lives—in the midst of a fruitless job hunt, while telling the truth about the hardest situations. This turn, that someone else is actually the enemy, and then Olive's pursuit of truth and justice, is one of the most difficult parts of the book to read—because we as readers believe her, but it's so difficult watching everyone else not trust her. But it's also the most rewarding, because we can see the evolution on the page of Ethan coming to the right decision, and her family to the same realization, and that's when the happily ever after between Ethan and Olive can occur. What an absolutely stunning and rewarding ending for a book that was already perfect.
Without a doubt, I will be reading more Christina Lauren. Don't miss anything from them by making sure to follow them on Instagram and Twitter @ChristinaLauren. You can find more of my reviews of this team's work here.
*This review can also be found on my Goodreads page*
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