Review | The Wedding Date

Title: The Wedding Date
Author: Jasmine Guillory
Publisher: Headline Publishing Group
Imprint: Headline Eternal
Release Date: January 30, 2018
Series Details: Standalone
Genre: Adult, Contemporary, Romance
Pages: 320

Blurb from Goodreads:

On the eve of his ex’s wedding festivities, Drew Nichols is minus a plus one. Until a power outage strands him with the perfect candidate for a fake girlfriend…

Agreeing to go to a wedding with a guy she gets stuck with in an elevator is not something Alexa Monroe would normally do. But Drew’s proposal proves hard to resist.

After their wedding date turns into a whole weekend of fun in San Francisco, Drew and Alexa return to their all-consuming careers – his in LA and hers in Berkeley. Too bad they can’t stop thinking about each other…

It could be the long-distance dating disaster of the century – or Drew and Alexa could be just a flight away from what each of them truly wants.

For a romance book, this wasn’t very romantic. At first it was really cute—because I love meet cutes, and hot “stuck-together-in-an-enclosed-space” stories, and even some good fake-dating tropes, cliché as they may sound. Sue me. All the nice things in this book is in its first quarter. Sadly, it all ended there. A good three quarters of this was painfully flat, forced, uneventful, and immature. I was bored out of my wits.

Everything started on a nice note for me. Drew and Alexa were both intriguing characters thrust into a pretty interesting situation— they were stuck together in the elevator. Shortly after that, they agreed to pose as a dating couple at a wedding. And I honestly find it cute and exciting. But then the wedding is over and everything just stopped being interesting. Everything I read after that was of Drew and Alexa having sex, eating, sleeping, one of them flying back home. Then one of them would fly to visit the other on weekends. Then back to having sex, eating, taking a shower… You can skip a chapter and not miss anything important to the story.

I don’t have problem with sex scenes in my books—if dialogues are candy, steamy scenes are cake. There’s too much shagging going on though, but none of it really felt romantic. All that shagging and I still didn’t see much chemistry between our main characters. Drew and Alexa kind of got there pretty early in the book and they don’t seem to know what else to do after that so they just have more sex. It was so anticlimactic. I wanted to see a couple who develops genuine feelings for each other as the story goes. Instead I see two people whose relationship seemed to be based on sex, who gets lusty everytime they see each other.

My greatest disappointment is with the lack of character development. Instead of growing up, the main characters grew more and more immature with each chapter. We knew so little about them. We knew nothing about Drew except that he’s a doctor. And Alexa is a lawyer who is so passionate about her project that aims to help teens. She sound so mature, so independent, a go-getter. Then she met Drew and suddenly she has a lot of insecurities which makes her rather quick in assuming the worst things about him. Drew was no better. He doesn’t do serious relationships—because, dumb reasons—so instead of nurturing this relationship that makes him honestly happy, he keeps thinking of the worst conclusions about Alexa too. It’s just tiring having two professional adults behave this way—like they’re bloody fifteen year olds. There would have been lesser misunderstandings and unnecessary emotional drama if they just talked to each other about what they feel.

The plot climax—if I can call it that—was not satisfying at all. One moment they were just happy to be together, and the next they were having their biggest childish fight. It wasn’t at all interesting. They broke up. They make up. Which isn’t even new because they’ve done that before. Then the story is over. And I was left feeling cheated because the whole thing wasn’t as adorable as what I was led to believe.

I go into The Wedding Date thinking of hilarious and lively banters, playful romantic dates, and maybe some sexual tension between the two. But the book lacks humor—although the characters laughs a lot about something that is completely unknown to the readers. There wasn’t any witty banters either. Even the sex was boring. And the plot was as terrible as Drew’s and Alexa’s communication skills! I’m sure there will be readers who will love and enjoy this—in fact, I may be in minority here—but this is just not for me.