The Honey-Don't List

Overall this is a quick, fun read. However, I didn't feel it quite lived up to The Unhoneymooners, which I really enjoyed. If you're a fan of the genre and a fan of Christina Lauren, I'd recommend it.

The characters felt a bit flat and the plot was a little flimsy. Rusty and Melissa, the show co-hosts and the novel's antagonists, were really sad. I was sort of hoping they would have a sweet reconciliation arc of rediscovering why they fell in love, but the further we got into the novel they became almost cartoonishly unlikable.

I did enjoy James and Carey's relationship, but kept getting hung up on aspects that didn't really make sense.

-Why did this HGTV-esque show need to hire an engineer, and if they did need an engineer why was James getting coffee for Rusty, who was doing the actual engineering?
-James working as Rusty's assistant due to lack of job prospects was odd (especially since he almost immediately gets a civil engineering job after the show implodes)
-I'm assuming a lot of these reno shows are largely fake anyway, so what does it matter if Melissa is the stage talent and Carey is the designer? Couldn't they have worked this out in a professional way? Lots of artist work for companies that technically own the art they are produce, it's just part of business
-James and Carey's break-up motivation didn't make any sense. Him having a private conversation about his job with his boss is in no way a betrayal of their barely week long relationship
-Carey's motivation to stay in her job is about finances and health insurance - but when she quits she immediately buys a house and discovers she can live a year without a job and still afford health insurance
-Sorry, I am really stuck on this engineering thing. They mention a hundred times that he is an engineer but never elaborate. It just feels like the authors didn't really do any research into fleshing out their characters. They didn't even mention what kind of engineer James is - computer, electrical, mechanical etc. was he building bridges in his previous job, was he writing software? All it would have taken was two or three sentences of exposition to clear this up. It would have made way more sense to make James a designer.

I received an advanced copy.