Book review #9: The Unhoneymooners

Book review: The Unhoneymooners by Christina Lauren
Format: ebook
Rating: 2/5 ⭐⭐

An enjoyable, quick read but just.. not enough (for me)? If you’re here for a quick review, then this Pros/Cons section is for you. (If you have some extra time then check out the full review down below).

Pros:
🌸 Short, easy read.
🌸 Funny.

Cons:
🥲 This is not the enemies-to-lover romance I was promised. 🙁
🥲 I felt like the MCs are just horny for each other and there’s no real emotional connection between them, unfortunately. 

My in depth review (with some spoilers, so read at your own risk):

1. Self-esteem and personality issues
Olive is our main character who is very hot but doesn’t know this (she knows that she has amazing boobs but also always feel like she’s fat and eats too much). To be fair, this was a little weird – I thought most pretty people know they’re pretty. There may be some form of self-deception where they over- or underestimate their beauty but it’s usually not that far off from the baseline. Unless perhaps Olive has some kind of underlying self-esteem issues in which case it should have been (but not) explored.

She’s also super dorky, doesn’t know when to stop talking, and is very unlucky with life and embarrassing things happen to her all the time.

To make things worse, somehow our main guy always makes Olive feel like she’s eating too much or looks disgusting which led to years of hatred-filled relationship between the two. Or at least that’s what the writer wants us to believe, except they seem to really enjoy bickering with each other (which added so much value to this book because they (the bickering) are hilarious!). But of course, it’s not really the enemies-to-lovers trope I was hoping for when he readily fell for her the moment he set eyes on her. That being said, the one thing I don’t get is how can you make someone feel so judged and intimidated with your facial expressions and random remarks and then, turn around and say it’s all a misunderstanding? What, he wasn’t making those disgusted faces? He said those hurtful words but they are supposed to mean something else? If not, was Olive just imagining /exaggerating it all? Like I mentioned earlier, sounds like we should get some more details on Olive’s personality/self-esteem issues.  

2. Sexual tension without chemistry
I thoroughly enjoyed the witty remarks between Olive and Ethan but not so much the constant sexual tension like geez, can we turn the horniness down a notch. I barely felt any real chemistry between the two and that was disappointing.

3. Unrealistic coincidences
A lot of “coincidences” and unrealistic occurrences happened but it’s a fiction and that makes it acceptable I guess. But then, come one.. Olive’s twin pays for her entire wedding with coupons and winning gifts? That’s just plain ridiculous. Can someone actually refute me here and give an example if this is at all possible?? 

4. The twist
I was very confused initially when the funny easy going rom-com suddenly took a dark turn into a family drama in the second half. Well, mystery solved when I found out that Christina Lauren is actually the pen name of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings who’ve been co-authors for a long time. I don’t quite know how co-authoring works, like do you have to strictly stay in your half of the book? Couldn’t the “drama” side of the story been a bit more spread out throughout the book? Who knows..

Conclusion
I know it seems like a lot of negatives here..  It’s obviously easier for me to point out the things I don’t like instead of the ones I loved because I’m clearly a depressed pessimistic human being. I hate writing negative reviews but here we are. This book actually received pretty decent great Goodreads reviews with an average rating of 4.02/5. Like I said in the pros section – it’s an easy, entertaining book. If you want to relax and enjoy a quick funny read – go get this now! But if you’re going to be nit-picky and pedantic like me, then maybe this is not for you.