Summary [courtesy of Goodreads]: Callyn Stott wakes up from a night-out at her friend Lara’s Bachelorette party in Vegas with a hangover… and a wife. She’s not really sure how she and her best friend Emma got hitched, only that they did and it’s completely and totally legal. Callyn is used to getting in and out of scrapes, but this one takes the cake. Further complicating matters, Emma suggest that they stay married for “financial reasons” that don’t really hold water. Not wanting to argue, Callyn agrees. The situation gets even more confusing when Callyn has to move out of her apartment, and where is she going to stay? With her fake wife, and best friend, of course. It’s not like anything is going to happen. Things between the two of them have always been strictly platonic and best-friendy, right? Emma hasn’t been secretly in love with Callyn her whole life and has just been waiting for Callyn to notice. No, surely not. Will Callyn get her head out of her ass and see what’s right in front of her, or will she live the rest of her life oblivious that the one person she’s always wanted is already there?
This sapphic romance is an utter delight!! The premise didn’t grab me (and the cover is…not my favorite–I’d love a hard copy reissue!!), but I was blown away by this sweet, endearing story. It’s got practically everything you could ask for: best-friends to spouses to lovers (!!), an awkward, ‘adulting is hard’ MC who can’t stop buying books (even when her backpack is barely big enough to fit them), a go-getter love interest who’s quit her high-paying job to pursue her vet tech dreams, and an adorable puppy named Vegas. (Ok, there are no cats…I think it would’ve been even better with cats, but the puppy was so cute I didn’t mind that he wasn’t a kitten 🙂 ).
If you liked Morgan Rogers’ Honey Girl (which also begins with 2 girls drunkenly getting married in Vegas) and want something that’s basically the inverse (best friends to lovers, instead of strangers to lovers), I’d definitely recommend checking this out. It’s very different in tone, as this is MUCH lighter, but it still features a pretty terrific cast of characters who make up the MC’s found family. Also, like Honey Girl, this book deals with twenty-somethings struggling to find their purpose in the midst of dealing with less than ideal parents. Here, the parents are very much NOT the foreground–again, this is much lighter than Honey Girl, which is more like a glorious but (mostly) safe emotional rollercoaster. This novel is more archetypal romance, but with lovely progressive flourishes thrown in. There are nonbinary peripheral characters (Cameron themself is nonbinary and uses both she/her and they/them pronouns), and the main characters regularly joke about the failings of the capitalist hellstate we live under. By the end of the book, the main character’s new job focuses on community and mutual care, and it was a delight to see. And while this is a fairly white book, the characters do sometimes discuss race and admit their privilege, particularly in their friend group (which isn’t exclusively white).
And while I didn’t love the mechanism that reunites the central pair in the end, it was resolved quickly enough that even I (hater of the merest hint of conflict or trauma in my romance) didn’t mind too much. All in all, this is a very fun time. But I am left wanting the same thing I wanted with Honey Girl: could this please be a series, Chelsea?? I want more of this friend group!!