Overall Grade: 4.5 ⭐️
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers; hate-to-love; forced proximity; one bed; best friend’s brother; opposites attract; bad boy-good girl; rom-com
I adore Pippa Grant. Her romances, aka rom-coms, are never what you expect but exactly what you need. Enter her latest story, The Worst Wedding Date. At first glance, Grant’s rom-coms are quirky and silly. However, below the surface, Grant works through common human troubles. This is definitely the case with The Worst Wedding Date. Some of the silliness of this story involves kittens rescued from a tropical island getaway, a tropical island getaway that is on the verge of going out of business as the backdrop for the story, an MMC who is a loud sneezer and who sneezes at the most inopportune times, and a variety of mishaps that seek to undermine the MMC’s sister’s wedding. Don’t get distracted by these moments of hilarity. If you do, you’ll miss out on the gravity of this story: a message about the impact of high or low expectations on one’s sense of self.
The most beguiling part of Pippa Grant’s The Worst Wedding Date is Theo and Laney’s attraction and falling in love. Grant has crafted them as two sides of the same coin. Laney has been raised with perfectionistic expectations. In contrast, Theo has been raised to believe he wouldn’t amount to much. He becomes the “bad boy” to Laney’s “good girl.” And I LOVED this part of the story because Theo gets to teach Laney how to be a little bad, embracing the things she’s always wanted to do but never empowered to do so, and Laney gets to protect Theo, advocating for him when he’s blamed for every mishap. It’s these places where Grant’s deft and enjoyable storytelling grabs your heart.
What I also loved about The Worst Wedding Date is the promise of more stories in this world. Besides Laney, the other ugly heiresses, Stella and Emma, have promises of their own stories, more quirky, charming antics to make Grant’s readers laugh while also challenging them to recognize the challenges of human nature.
In the end, if you walk away from Pippa Grant’s newest book without that warm feeling in your chest, you may need to check your pulse.
In love and romance,
Professor A
Professor Romance 