The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory

3/5 Stars

This is the third book I am reading by Jasmine Guillory and I am extremely surprised at how much I wasn't impressed by this.

Alexa and Drew meet while stuck inside an elevator and they start talking. Drew is really handsome but his ex-girlfriend not only is to marry his best friend but also he was called to be the best man. To make things worse, he's dateless. As an impulse, Drew ends up inviting Alexa to play his girlfriend for the weekend.

To begin, this novel felt very unorganized. The novel starts off with Drew needing a date for the wedding, but that plotline was over within the first quarter. As I was reading I thought that the entire book was going to take place at the wedding, maybe in the course of a day?? I thought that formatting the story that way would've kept the essence a lot more than how Guillory did it. Most of their relationship was long-distance because they were constantly booking flights to see each other -- since they lived on different sides of the state -- and sending flirty text messages.

It really irked me how the title of this novel really had very little to do with what actually happened in the plot. The wedding really only took up about 25% of the page count. This leads me into the disorganization of this novel. It just seemed like she had the idea of two people going to a wedding together and falling in love, but as she was writing it, it turned into something completely different.

Something that was also very uncommon when it comes to Jasmine Guillory novels is bordem. The entire novel, both, Alexa and Drew have no idea if they are actually together or not simply because of lack of commitment. I'm not saying these things don't happen in actual relationships, but for a plot of a novel, it's just a tad bit boring.

Another complaint I have about this novel was that there were just way too many instances where they just have a bunch of sex for no reason. I'd be reading and then all of a sudden Drew was caressing Alexa in a certain way and I'd think, "uh oh here we go again...". I have nothing against sex scenes in novels, just as long as it serves the plot, is written well, and isn't excessive. The sex scenes in this novel written by Guillory were none of those things.

Something I will continue to love about Guillorys novels is that the protagonist is always a woman of color and it always fits into the plot somehow. I think there has always been an assumption that the protagonist in novels is always white. It isn't anyone's fault, but it has just always seemed to be the default in people's minds and I like that in every single one of her novels she makes it apparent that her characters can be people of color.

This less than favorable review does not diminish how much trust I have in Jasmine Guillory for a good, fun, and quick rom-com, but this has probably been my least favorite of the ones I've read.