i love a friends to lovers trope! this book made we wish i was on a tropical island. i thought the first half was pretty slow but otherwise it enjoyed it!

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin's Press for a copy of this ARC!

This took a really long time to read, and not because it was actually bad - I know this book has a really strong audience out there just representation-wise alone. Meryl Wilsner is an amazing author and I don't think you can go wrong with anything by them. I just don't think it was for me.

I didn't fully buy in to Ginny and Elsie's relationship which is really the heart of the story, so without that it felt very surface level. I'm a sucker for friends to lovers, too, because I also married my best friend after being friends for awhile! I just didn't believe in their relationship on a romantic level. I could tell that Ginny was in love with Elsie, but anything Elsie felt besides horniness came across as an afterthought, especially when they both kept saying they could still be friends constantly. And I get it! Taking the next step in a relationship like that is scary! It just felt like a way to prolong the story instead of taking time to actually develop and show how in love Elsie was with Ginny and what that looked like.

The story also felt rushed on the back end especially with a whole ton of new characters that felt like they could've been mentioned sooner. For example, Sue could have mentioned her friends looking to have a custom bed built by name before Ginny and Elsie go on the not-honeymoon, you know? I like what I think they were supposed to represent - Ginny and Elsie building lives outside of each other - but spending so much time with them instead of the romantic leads left the HEA as almost anticlimactic.

That being said, I did really love the characters of Ginny and Elsie themselves. Ginny forcing Elsie to make a list of things she must do on her not-honeymoon was a little too close to home in a way I think a lot of us can relate to. The supporting characters were also excellent, even if I wasn't a huge fan of how they were introduced.

Like I said, I will always read and support anything Meryl Wilsner writes because they are a great writer and their characters are next level. This one just wasn't my favorite.

this was just not it. I love me a friends to lovers story, but this unfortunately suffered from needing the reader to just assume these two worked well together instead of actually showing and real development or love. Ginny and Elsie could not communicate to save their lives, and the amount of telling vs showing did not make a believable romance. Also, why was the middle 40% of this book mediocre smut? The first time came out of literally nowhere then that was all that happened. I didn’t love cleat cute but I enjoyed it much more than this book. thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I really enjoyed this book! It was my first f/nb and Meryl Wilsner book, and I wasn’t sure what to expect.

This sweet story of self discovery was a cozy, spicy read.

Meryl hit it out of the park again with this book, I have yet to be let down by a book I've read by this author. I love a second chance romance/childhood best friends book and who wouldn't realize they were in love with their best friend in the most romantic setting possible?

My only critique for this book is that the characters were a little young for this life long partnership and how the HECK did the ex fiance afford this honeymoon resort at 23.

Wilsner delivers a perfect escape read with equal parts spice and emotion. The bittersweet history between the main characters make for a perfect storm of a turbulent but hopeful romance.

ARC kindly provided by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

⭐️⭐️⭐️.5

I couldn't put this down. I enjoyed the premise, and it's refreshingly different from other queer romcoms. There is good nonbinary representation. The end was a bit slow for me, but overall it was a cute read. Pretty spicy too.

When Elsie finds out her fiancé is cheating on her she calls off her wedding and goes on her honeymoon with her best friend Ginny. sweet, quick, read

I really enjoyed this book! I have to admit there were parts of the story that fell very slow and dragged on (particularly in the first 40 percent of the book) and then it really sped and I couldn’t put it down. I enjoyed the characters Ginny and Elsie. Overall it is a story that I would read again. I give this book 4 out of 5 stars. Thank you netgalley and publisher for the advanced copy.

I truly wanted to like this

best friends that have always been in love with each other going on a trip to the tropics?! i thought this would be so fun but it just unfortunately wasn’t

the relationship between our main characters went from school age crush to hooking up for the entire rest of the book without any real relationship development

the characters needed to be flushed out more along with more of a plot, the bones are good but there is no meat!

~vibes~

•queer (nb lesbian x pan)
•small town
•self-discovery
•vacation in the tropics
•steamy

(3.25⭐️ but rounding up) This is a fast-paced best friends to lovers romance featuring plenty of spice set primarily on a flirty and fun tropical vacation.

representation: pan fmc | nb lesbian mc
tropes: friends to lovers | one bed | vacation romance

Pitfalls (some light spoilers below): This book needed about 10x more yearning and build-up!!! The mutual pining is typically the best part of a friends-to-lovers trope but this missed the mark. The first kiss/hook-up felt very fast and casual, which didn’t fit the theme of the characters moving toward this moment for 15 years. And if the 3rd act break-up is going to last 30% (!!) of the book, the story should have given more time to showing their relationship instead of relying on what they had built as friends off page. I’m all for spice but not if it comes at the price of the emotional development and I think there could have been about 50 pages added to the first quarter of the book.

I really had a hard time with this one, unfortunately. I loved a couple of the author’s other books but this one was almost painful to read and I DNFed at 33%. Your experience may be different from mine so please give it a read, this author deserves all the good things in the world for writing representative queer fiction! I absolutely loved Cleat Cute and Something to Talk About but this one had some issues for me personally.

While I deeply appreciate that the author included a non-binary main character, there was a lot of explaining of what this means in these asides where the main character explained their non-binary experience. I really wish that if this had really been so important to the author, they could’ve showed this through scenes in the present like an intimate conversation between Ginny and someone else for relationship-building of whatever kind rather than just essentially explaining it to the reader in a way that didn’t really feel organic to a character’s interior monologue. It felt like we as reader were not trusted to understand even a little bit of this experience, and it sometimes gave it a defensive tone (which is valid, nonbinary identities are often misunderstood or scorned - but like if someone’s picking up this book….come on).

Same goes for Ginny being fat – I feel like it was constantly brought up in ways that showed the character’s anxiety and bitterness about the rarity of finding spaces that fit them, but my reaction to it coming up every time was like, “oh my god again?!” It didn’t feel true to experience or important to the dynamics of the story, and it all got a bit tiresome and distracting from the budding relationship, which was frustrating. Others may have a different experience than me with this part of the story, but I really liked how When Grumpy Met Sunshine handled someone being insecure/scarred about this rather than this way of narrating via internal monologue.

Obviously I stopped early, so I don’t have much to say about the rest of the book. But from skimming and from the first third, this book seems to be built on the premise of lack of communication for a really really really long time, both between the main characters and also them each not being self-aware about their patterns in asking for what they need (or not asking). It also gets kind of heated kind of fast when they get on vacation with weird dynamics (Ginny will do anything Elsie wants and Elsie delights in this which was cute but weird??) and I was genuinely like, where the hell did this come from, you spend so much time together apparently in normal life and this is only a problem now? I get that this instalust/vacation changes everything trope works for some folks, but I didn’t find that I believed in the foundation of trust and intimacy between them enough to not cringe when they started getting together, and stopped before it got too spicy.

I did enjoy Ginny just straight up quitting their job, that was excellent, and that I could see a storyline developing where they will arrive at the conclusion of starting their own woodworking business probably? Idk. I just feel with another round of edits and more show-than-tell this was promising, which made it all the more disappointing.

All in all - not my favorite of their works, but I’m just one person - give it a read if vacation get-together and/or best-friends-to-lovers are your jam.

Thank you to Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press for the advance copy, provided in exchange for an honest review.

My Best Friend’s Honeymoon is a steamy tale of friends to lovers. On another level it is about friendship and finding oneself. This book was very readable!

Romance is one of those genres I don't pick up on a regular basis. But I'm trying to expand my horizons and read things I wouldn't normally gravitate to. While this book wasn't quite my jam, it was still a good read. The friends to lovers storyline was sweet AND spicy!

This was a quick and easy read and I loved the non-binary/female romance representation. However, the pacing of it felt super off! It quite literally goes from 0–100. (Spoilers)


Ginny, the NBMC has been in love with her best friend Elsie forever. They actually told Elsie in high school but got turned down to avoid ruining their friendship.
Her best friend, Elsie, has no idea what she wants. She’s currently content working at her family owned store and engaged to Derrick, but afraid to speak up about anything. After being engaged for 2 years, with the wedding a week away, Elsie finally tells Derrick she can’t marry him. The honeymoon however, is non-refundable. Elsie invites Ginny on her honeymoon - only to find out that Elsie has also been in love with Ginny too. There’s flashbacks to Elsie admitting she had feelings for a girl when she was younger and getting bullied for it, hence the miscommunication trope. Once Elsie figures out Ginny is who she wants, it’s literally just sex until they have a little argument and it’s time to go home lmao. It wasn’t a bad read per se, but it definitely could have been better! I just wish their relationship had more substance to it, considering they do get their happy ending!

I felt like this book was too disjointed. The plot progression prevented any emotional attachment to the story and the plot itself was not very compelling. The book touched on serious issues but failed to craft an appropriate vehicle for them to be explored.

This wasn't my favorite but it wasn't a bad book. I was not a huge fan of either MC so it made it more difficult to invest in the plot. There was a good amount of spice in this one but it seemed to be clustered into a few chapters which made it feel off pacing wise. There was some good plus size and queer rep, but didn't really give me a building romance or insta-love. It just felt like there was some scenes that were cut out in the middle of the relationship forming.

This book started out with a lot of promise. We meet our MCs, Elsie and Ginny, at a truly pivotal moment—Elsie's fiancé has just planned a surprise wedding for the two of them...for next week. Yikes! He tries to elicit help from the bride-to-be's best friend Ginny, but they are not on board with the plan and dodge the request. Long story short: Elsie ends the engagement, goes on the honeymoon trip with Ginny, and their unacknowledged lifetime attraction is consummated (and consummated, and consummated, and consummated) in a vacation paradise.

With such a fun premise, I really should have loved the novel. But I did not. Where did it go wrong?

Ugh, I could answer that so many ways, but here are my top three frustrations with My Best Friend's Honeymoon—

1. Overuse of the miscommunication trope—I get that she's only 23, but Elsie's backstory wasn't strong enough to justify just how weak of a character she ends up being. And honestly? Ditto for Ginny, even though I ended up liking them better. This trope was made even more frustrating since internal dialogue took up the page space that should have been dedicated to plot or character development. Seriously, when a bulk of the MC's epiphanies happen off page, I've got to wonder why I'm even reading.

2. The collection of secondary characters was so underdeveloped that each one of them seemed like a shim ineffectively trying to bring some balance to the narrative. A real shame since the trivia crew that shows up briefly in act three could have brought some legitimate depth to both the story and Ginny's character. Same for Elsie's sister, who makes a brief appearance to give her the absolute gentlest of hard truths in the same act.

3. Equating kink with intimacy and maturity. And I'm not just talking about the string of spicy chapters on the island. I'm also talking about the conversation between Ginny and her woodworking pal about the custom furniture build. While the spice itself was fine (I had a vigorous internal dialogue while reading, trying to decide if the spice rating should be four chili peppers or five...and then I got to one scene—you know which one—and was like, "Yep, ok, five), I really hated that it replaced actual intimacy between Elsie and Ginny, and that Ginny's naivety was used by another queer character to identify them as a "baby gay."

So, a few things really bothered me about this book. Still, I'm giving it the "I liked it" rating and I'll have to decide in my own heart if I'm awarding it bonus queer points (because, yay, for an nb protagoinist!) or if it sincerely deserves all three stars. And I for sure know a few romance readers who will like this one better than I did.

3.5

This was the first book I’ve read from Meryl Wilsner. I loved the non-binary and plus size representation in the book.

There was a good amount of spice which I thought was well written. However, I wish there was a heavier focus on the relationship development instead of the sexual encounters. I did not feel a strong romantic chemistry or spark between Ginny and Elsie, it seemed a bit rushed and forced.

I also hate hate hate the miscommunication trope! It is so frustrating when the main characters cannot communicate with each other.

Thank you NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the eARC!

I have been on a major reading slump since the US election in November. Since the January inauguration things have only gotten worse. It was going to take a new book from one of my top 10 authors to get me to read again. Cue "My Best Friend's Honeymoon" by Meryl Wilsner. Although this is clearly a friends to lovers story, it really doesn't feel like a standard trope. Elsie and Ginny are two completely innovative characters, different from any I've read before. Same for the story. One pansexual character and one non-binary character, and no one seems to think it's odd. I love that. Anyone not in a reading slump could easily finish this in one long afternoon, it's that unputdownable.

Thanks to Meryl Wilsner for helping me through my slump!