A review by wardenred
Never Marry Your Brother's Best Friend by Lauren Landish

emotional funny medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Plot
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? It's complicated
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

His mere presence annoys me. Actually, his existence on the planet.

This book is a tricky one to review for me, because I just can’t shake the feeling I’ve read a messy first draft. I don’t mean it in the sense of prose being clunky or pacing being all over the place; the writing is actually fairly smooth and immersive, and the pacing is more or less fine, save for stuff like the reveal about the reasons for the initial animosity between the leads coming too late and kinda out of the blue. I’m more talking about the story itself.

See, it felt all the events and relationship developments simply piled up, with the author seemingly just jumping each time to whichever seemed like the coolest/funnest idea. Nothing wrong with that! But this led to a seriously inconsistent narrative that felt almost like it followed several different sets of characters with the same names. And some of those characters were perfectly compelling flawed fictional human beings with relatable problems, while others were just completely unhinged, and I never knew which option I was getting in the nearest chapter. The whole fake marriage plot just kept spiraling out of control, too—sometimes in ways that were at least entertaining, but ultimately the key points of it barely made sense. Or rather, each of them kind of made sense in isolation, but looking back at the book, I just fail to see a singular coherent narrative. 

The thing is, I can see the bones of a pretty strong romance underneath it all. But I just feel like there are some important transitions missing, and some creative choices could perhaps be tweaked or toned down to better match what came before and after. As it is, the book is kind of all over the place, though the combination of some of those more unhinged developments and the dynamic writing style made it a very entertaining experience regardless.