The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory ~ Book Review

The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory
Berkley
Genre: Romane
Release Date: January 30, 2018
My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪

The Wedding Date is an ideal Valentine’s Day read. The story opens with the perfectly rom-com meeting of Alexa and Drew in a hotel elevator that suddenly breaks down. *Sigh.* The two of them seem to be stuck there together for about five minutes, but nonetheless, it is somehow enough time for Drew to force Alexa to give him some of the cheese and crackers she brought for her sister (honestly, that’s just straight up rude), and for him to decide he wants to bring her as his date to the wedding of his best-friend and ex-girlfriend. I could pretty much see the opening credits unfurling across this scene (seriously, has anyone bought the rights to make this into a movie? If not, get on it).

Predictably, the story revolves around the ups and downs of the burgeoning relationship between our two main characters. Although each wants to have more than just a casual fling, their initial arrangement (during which Drew asks Alexa to pretend she is his girlfriend) confuses each as to how the other is really feeling. Neither one knows how much of their chemistry is real, and how much is a show put on to help legitimize their fake relationship to the rest of the wedding party. This added an interesting dynamic that made the story seem less clichéd than I initially anticipated it to be. Additionally, Alexa’s upfront attitude towards addressing their difference in race added some depth to the plot.

I whipped through this book in a day. It was cute and sexy, and I thoroughly enjoyed the banter between the two main characters. That being said, it definitely got repetitive towards the end. By the time I reached the final chapters, I wanted to shake Alexa to get her to stop thinking about how self-conscious she was about her body image. I’m not sure why there was so much stress placed on this matter. I get it, she’s insecure about her body, but Drew thinks she’s great, moving on…. It would have been nice to either address this issue more obviously (i.e. have the characters actually talk about it), or make it less heavy handed. There were also a lot of very similar scenes of Drew and Alexa seeing each other again for the first time in a week, waking up together, having coffee together etc. They were well written, but I could only read a different iteration of the same scene so many times.

Despite these few setbacks, this was a fun read for me, and it was definitely different from the heavy grittiness of the thrillers I tend to lean towards. Since I went through this book so quickly, I did not have time to bake, but eating an absurd number of chocolates seemed like an appropriate choice to accompany it given the aggressively chocolate-heavy marketing of Valentine’s Day.

My Rating: 🍪🍪🍪
The Wedding Date on Goodreads
Buy The Wedding Date on Amazon