The Unhoneymooners will make you feel soft in all the right ways

Christina Lauren’s The Unhoneymooners is built with deft hands, hitting all the right emotional notes and addressing some key issues at the same time.

Have you ever been reading a novel in public and have to suddenly remember that you’re in public, lest you hug your reading material to your chest and let out a couple of noises? Such was this reader’s experience with The Unhoneymooners, the new novel from writing duo Christina Lauren.

If you’ve ever seen a meme or a tweet about the idea of sharing a bed in fanfiction, then you might understand why. It’s more than just that, though, when it comes to the story of Olive and Ethan, and how they grow together as people while falling in love.

After all, their whole relationship, as siblings of two people who are becoming spouses, has never been healthy, and it all goes back to first impressions being wrong. Since the book is told almost entirely from Olive’s perspective, we get the majority of her development firsthand, but Ethan’s development is clear all the same, and done well enough that it’s very noticeable.

Part of that development comes from body shaming — perceived or otherwise — between the two of them, as Olive is a bit curvier. It’s not clear just how curvy she is, which is maybe a missed opportunity to showcase women of all sizes being worthy of love and happiness. However, we know that she’s self-conscious about it, which is just as important.

If anything, the book gets a bit shaky in its final third not because of the characters’ regression into old habits (which is worthy of applause; growth is not linear). Instead, it’s due to some of the dialogue choices, which feel a bit more awkward there than they do in previous interactions, only to swing back to a better quality by the end of the book.

The first two-thirds, though, which are “enemies to friends to lovers” done oh-so-right so as to inspire squeals, are glorious, featuring a wedding, fallout from a wedding, and a trip to Maui under false pretenses. (Did we mention that Olive and Ethan have to pretend to be married? Because they have to pretend to be married. Please hold your noises in, readers.)

And yet even though these story beats are so familiar that the mention of them alone has been the subject of tweets, Tumblr posts, and more, there’s still something fresh about this story, thanks to the added development and issues it addresses. Of course, the comfort level shouldn’t be discounted, especially not when the familiar plots are played so well.

For a May read, it’s hard to go wrong with The Unhoneymooners. Just be aware of where you read it, because it is that cute.