Reviews

Hadley Donavan can’t believe she has to go home to Nebraska for her sister’s wedding. She’s gonna need a wingman and a whole lot of vodka for this level of family interaction. At least her bestie agreed he’d man up and help. But then instead of her best friend, his evil twin strolls out of the airport.

If you looked up doesn’t-deserve-to-be-that-confident, way-too-hot-for-his-own-good billionaire in the dictionary, you’d find a picture of Will Holt. He’s awful. Horrible. The worst―even if his butt looks phenomenal in those jeans.

Ten times worse? Hadley’s buffer was supposed to be there to keep her away from the million and one family events. But Satan’s spawn just grins and signs them up for every. Single. Thing.

Fine. “Cutthroat” Scrabble? She’s in. She can’t wait to take this guy down a notch. But somewhere between Pictionary and the teasing glint in his eyes, their bickering starts to feel like more than just a game…

Avery Flynn’s ‘The Wedding Date Disaster’ was something I wanted to read for a long while. The tropes seemed fantastic and the setting even better, with some humour scattered throughout in the form of familial relationships that tended to embarrass rather than elevate.

Will Holt’s grudge against Hadley Donovan’s friendship with his twin is one rooted in suspicion: she’s supposedly just yet another woman out to fleece his brother out of their family fortune and is in the midst of orchestrating an elaborate move that will clinch it for her. Obviously it’s all in his mind: Hadley’s friendship with his brother is just that—a close friendship built on love and support.

It’s a great premise honestly, more so because Will has the history and the experience to back his claim up, and Hadley’s constant exasperation with him is so in line with her optimistic and sweet-ish character. There isn’t anything too vile in their reactions to each other nonetheless: there are cutting words, but nothing too malicious for a rom-com that’s built on mistaken opinions and the need to learn some life lessons from that…while falling in love by the end of course.

I mostly had a good time with this, yet the long and short of it is, I found myself sitting in the middle of the line the more Hadley/Will’s sniping wore on. As much as I liked the ‘frenemies/hostile’ vibe, I thought that Flynn could have further developed something beyond the simmering attraction and lust so that it still didn’t turn out to be much of a surprise when both characters admitted to being in love. In fact, the repetitive statements about Will’s constant belief that Hadley was out to rip him and his brother of their family fortune worked perhaps too well—I could definitely understand and bought his deep suspicions—so the confession that he stubbornly hung onto this belief was because he was in love with her all along didn’t sit too well with me. In the whole spectrum of ‘hate-lust’ to ‘love’, there was simply too little in between before we were magically teleported to the end result.

There was certainly more grovelling that needed to be done by the end—a heartfelt confession sometimes wouldn’t be enough before it was a fast-forward to the epilogue. It was a huge fun mess really if this is your sort of rom-com, but Hadley/Will’s buoyant adventure was somewhat let down by the rushed last quarter.