Thank you to the lovely people at Berkley Romance for my copy of The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory.  All thoughts and images are my own.

THE DETAILS:

Title: The Wedding Date
Author: Jasmine Guillory
Genre: Romance
Pub date: January 30, 2018
Read if you like: The Kiss Quotient, The Proposal, bingeing on rom-coms.

MORGAN’S THOUGHTS:

All right hopeless romantics, my summer of reading romance concluded with a total gem: The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory.  It’s a brilliant meet cute with a healthy dose of reality – what happens after the perfect first weekend has ended?  How sustainable is a long distance relationship for two working adults? If The Wedding Date could talk, it would say “let’s delve into these predicaments, but let’s have a ton of fun while we do it.”

That’s not to say this read is completely realistic; Guillory certainly attempts to give readers both the highest highs of true connection with an unexpected someone else and the unavoidable lows of a romance brought into the daylight.  The beginning is delightful – everything you want in a romance. A bit of confusion on either side, despite an undeniable attraction between two strangers turned significant others overnight, but the attraction wins out in the end. The set up has a bit of a Cinderella effect to it – the romance might expire after these 36 hours, but isn’t it worth it if it’s only for this whirlwind of affection?

The Cinderella story stops here, but The Wedding Date does not.  Guillory doesn’t end it after the happily ever after – she allows you to live with Alexa and Drew for a bit longer.  She illustrates each of their worlds – their different but equally high-powered jobs, their myriad of overly involved friends (speaking as an overly involved friend, myself), their past dating lives.  She explores in what ways the merging of these two worlds is possible and in what ways they’re completely incompatible.

This is a diverse romance with a whimsical start, a serious middle, and a passionate finish.  If you love love, you will most likely love this book. I definitely had a fun time reading it!

Interested in The Wedding Date?  Click here to support your local indie bookstore or here to buy it on Amazon.

SYNOPSIS: (AS TOLD BY THE BACK OF THE BOOK)

I vow to take thee as my date, to pretend to have and to hold, from rehearsal dinner to reception end, till Sunday do us part.

Agreeing to go to a wedding with a guy she gets stuck with in an elevator is something Alexa Monroe wouldn’t normally do.  She’s definitely not the spontaneous type. But there’s something about Drew Nichols that’s too hard to resist.

Drew has never found it hard to meet women – or to know just when to leave them.  But now, on the eve of his ex’s wedding festivities, he’s minus a plus-one… until a power outage strands him with the perfect candidate for a fake girlfriend.

From the best man’s toast to the bouquet toss, Alexa and Drew have more fun than they ever thought possible.  But before they know it, Drew has to fly back to Los Angeles and his job as a pediatric surgeon, and Alex heads home to Berkeley, where she’s the mayor’s chief of staff – and neither of them can stop thinking about the other.  

They’re just two high-powered professionals on a collision course toward the long distance dating disaster of the century – or closing the gap between what they think they need and what they truly want…