Review: The Wedding Date

The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory

Rating: 1 Star

I wanted to like this book so much. I've been hearing so much buzz around it and the premise is one that is definitely catnip to me. I love this kind of rom-com in any form; tv, movie, book, I eat it all up. The additional layer of an interracial relationship should have been an added bonus to an already fun and interesting story.

However, the entire book fell completely on its face for me. There wasn't a single redeeming quality about this story (although, admittedly, I did skim the last 10% of the book, I just couldn't take it anymore).
The first major issue for me was the writing itself. It felt like a project for a freshman's creative fiction seminar. The ideas are there, the conventions are okay, but altogether it just doesn't work. There was no flow to the writing and the sentences were choppy and repetitive. The page breaks were also terrible; there were breaks where it didn't make sense, and in other sections there weren't breaks where there clearly should have been. Guillory also spent way too much time talking about food; where the characters were going to eat, what they were eating, etc. It just didn't make sense to me, neither of the characters had any connection to food except that they eat, and the focus on food really took me out of the story. It interrupted the flow (what little of that there was) unnecessarily in my opinion. Finally, at one point the author used all capital letters to show emphasis within the narrative (not as a character's text message or email) and I do not like that at all.

The second major issue was the content (and really, after that, what's left?). The heroine, Alexa, was so insecure. It drove me absolutely up the wall! I understand that some insecurity can make a character relatable, but at the level Guillory wrote Alexa, it was just obnoxious. She was a pretty, smart woman in a position of some power; she shouldn't have spent the book acting like a 14 year old girl trying to navigate junior high. Drew had issues too, for sure, but Alexa's insecurity really stood out and rubbed me the wrong way. 

The other major content issue I had was the lack of communication between Alexa and Drew. I know that part of the rom-com trope is some sort of miscommunication, but this went way beyond the normal miscommunication between characters. They didn't talk to each other throughout the whole book, it seemed and all of their problems could have been solved by just having a conversation! It was extremely frustrating to read. One miscommunication is fine, but the entire plot being driven by a constant lack of conversation between two adults? That's just obnoxious. 

I really wish I could have loved this book, and I really wanted to, but it just had too many problems for me to ignore and get fully invested in the story. I never connected to the characters, never felt their chemistry, and honestly, didn't feel much of anything throughout the whole book. I was extremely disappointed that a book with such potential didn't deliver even a little bit.