To get a better opinion on novels from the author’s duo Christina Lauren, I bought the TikTok Trend Unhoneymooners. The pitch is funny, entailing a quite predictable enemy-to-lovers trope.
Ami has a perfect life, while her twin sister Olive is “bad luck” incarnated. The tables turn at Ami’s wedding, when everyone gets food poisoning except for Olive and Ethan, the brother of the groom. Both get the opportunity to travel to Maui on Ami and Dane’s honeymoon. But they would have to pretend to be happily married and currently they hate each other.
The novel is relatively short, reads well. The first half is Olive and Ethan hating each other, the second half is them realizing they don’t hate each other. As the enemy-to-lovers trope is very predictable, one might expect how the outcome of this novel is. Same as in the other novel I read, the characters lack a bit of depth, it also seems that their career is completely secondary to their lives, but offers to be a nice extra. Obviously there were a few more steamy scenes as from the middle of the novel, where the focus on Ethan’s muscles (abs or biceps) or Olive’s boobs get a bit annoying with time.
All in all it’s a good novel for a holiday without too much depth, the narrative elements are used quite repetitively. Nonetheless all the characters try (few exceptions for the bad guys) to have healthy and empowering relationships.
