The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
**3.5-stars rounded up**
Meet Cute turns Forever Cute…or does it!?
Stuck in an elevator with an attractive man was not how Alexa Monroe saw this evening going. Arriving at a hotel to visit her sister, who is just in town for a night, with a bottle of champagne and cheese and crackers in her purse, she’s ready for a night of girl chat. What she gets is an interesting proposal.
Dr. Drew Nichols is at the hotel for a wedding weekend. The wedding of his ex-girlfriend to one of his best friends from med school. Not awkward at all.
Making matters worse, his date cancelled on him at the last minute so he is running solo. Now stuck in the elevator with an attractive young woman, the answer becomes clear! He needs to convince her to be his date. His fake girlfriend for the whole weekend. Luckily, Dr. Nichols is very persuasive.
And so begins one of the best fake date tropes in history. I adored the wedding weekend for Drew and Alexa. Alexa is such a great character. Extremely relatable. She has some self doubts and insecurities that many of us have probably had. Especially when starting to date a new person. I like how that came off on the page, very believable to me.
Drew is so charming and fun without being annoying. He also had some believable and relatable traits when it came to commitments and second guessing himself.
I would definitely say that I had more fun with the first half of the book compared to the second half. It was still a good story, I just found myself becoming frustrated at the lack of communication. This being said, I think a lot of relationships IRL suffer from lack of communication too, so maybe this is how it really would have gone.
One aspect I did really enjoy was how much we learned about Alexa and Drew’s careers. This wasn’t just all about the romance. There was that but we were also dealing with adults who had lives prior and outside of their romance. I liked seeing that.
I also liked that we were reading about a mixed race couple and it wasn’t just glossed over. They did have some conversations about it and I appreciated that.
There was some depth to this story but also a lot of steaminess. The steamy scenes were good, although at times I did catch some repetitive phrasing and such that was meh. Overall though, a fun little read!
I am looking forward to reading the companion novels in this series. I believe The Proposal features Drew’s friend, Carlos, and The Wedding Party focuses on Maddie and Theo. I am really excited to get to both of those!
I would definitely recommend this book to other romance readers. I think it is important to note that I am just starting to get into romance, so my opinions are from a reader fairly inexperienced in the genre. I still think even advanced romance readers could have fun with this though!