Review of The Wedding Party by Jasmine Guillory

 

In my twenties I lived in an apartment with four or five roommates.  One night one of them called a meeting and told the rest of us that she had a big announcement: she had been secretly dating another roommate's brother for several months now.  She was positively gleeful.  "Did you really think we were going to the all-night grocery store that often?"

The rest of us looked at each other, completely baffled.  We had jobs, and friends, and . . . lives.  None of us had taken any particular note of when Tamara did her grocery shopping, or who she did it with.  None of us cared who she or Brian's brother were dating, or that they were dating each other.  They thought that they had thrown the wool over our eyes, when in reality we were simply looking in an entirely different direction.

 I have no doubt that the secrecy and sneaking around made for really hot sex.  Good for them.  But the bottom line was, their story was not very interesting to anyone other than themselves.

And so it is, alas, with The Wedding Party by Jasmine Guillory.   Maddie and Theo are having sex, and hiding it from Maddie's best friend who is Theo's boss.  That's the entire story.  Oh, there is some (very) limited character development.  Maddie decides that she does not enjoy making fun of homeless people.  Theo . . . uh, misses a couple of weeks of work when he is injured and learns . . . that he is not going to lose his job.  

A book like this could be saved if the sex were amazing -- for the readers, not for the characters.  Although this book frequently informs us that Maddie and Theo are having, did have, or are about to have mindblowing sex, the descriptions of the acts themselves are too tame to make them any more interesting to me than my roommate's sex-having was.  Good for my roommate.  Good for Maddie and Theo.  But as for me -- hitting the all-night grocery store might be more fun.