My Favorite Half-Night Stand is my third book by the Christina Lauren writing duo, and nothing is going to stop me from reading their entire backlist!
Format: Paperback
Genre: Contemporary Romance
Page Length: 384 pages
Publisher: Gallery Books (December 4, 2018)
Star Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mr. Darcy‘s Rating: “You have bewitched me, body and soul.”
A Chasing Mr. Darcy Review
I absolutely love everything that Christina Lauren write, and I have yet to find a book of theirs I don't love. This was my third book by the dynamic duo, and I'm already hungry for more!
Here’s a summary from GoodReads: Millie Morris has always been one of the guys. A UC Santa Barbara professor, she’s a female-serial-killer expert who’s quick with a deflection joke and terrible at getting personal. And she, just like her four best guy friends and fellow professors, is perma-single. So when a routine university function turns into a black tie gala, Mille and her circle make a pact that they’ll join an online dating service to find plus-ones for the event. There’s only one hitch: after making the pact, Millie and one of the guys, Reid Campbell, secretly spend the sexiest half-night of their lives together, but mutually decide the friendship would be better off strictly platonic. But online dating isn’t for the faint of heart. While the guys are inundated with quality matches and potential dates, Millie’s first profile attempt garners nothing but dick pics and creepers. Enter “Catherine”—Millie’s fictional profile persona, in whose make-believe shoes she can be more vulnerable than she’s ever been in person. Soon “Catherine” and Reid strike up a digital pen-pal-ship...but Millie can’t resist temptation in real life, either. Soon, Millie will have to face her worst fear—intimacy—or risk losing her best friend, forever.
I am an academic. I'm a finance professor, so I really appreciate every work of fiction I can read about academics...do you know why? Because the works of fiction are SO close to the truth sometimes! Christina Lauren created a friend group on this story that might as well have been a group of my colleagues. Now, I'm not saying I work with a "Reid" from the story (boy, do I WISH I did, though, let me tell you...holy abs), but I could 100% see the personalities of some of my academic friends in these characters. From the socially awkward Ed to the charming and cute Reid, I could match each of these boys to someone I know. And I love that! I love that Christina Lauren give us a work of fiction while also giving us characters who seem real and identifiable. I think that's one reason I love their books so much; they really give me something hang onto after I'm finished with them.
I thoroughly enjoyed Millie's relationship with all the boys in this book. I felt like this was a Sidney White meets academics in this story at times because Millie was definitely queen of the nerds. Her friendship with them was the undercurrent of the story at many places, and I appreciated how much focus Christina Lauren put on the friendship aspect of this story. I also really enjoyed when the secrets started to slip out, and people were brought into her Millie's confidence. It was one of those things that you just knew would not end well, but you couldn't turn away from it. You had to keep reading! My favorite was when Ed admitted to hearing Millie and Reid have sex like it was no big thing; the secret they were both so intent on keeping from the guys was something most of the guys assumed would happen anyway, which was pretty funny.
I think this story was relatable because we've all had "the friend," the Reid of this story. The opposite sex friend that we are closer to any of our friends of the opposite sex; the friend with whom we share casual touches and embraces with more than our other friends, almost daring ourselves to push the invisible boundary lines of friendship. The friend that we wonder about and just know they are wondering about us too, but both of us are too scared to push those friendship barriers to see how much give there is. This book personifies that struggle and lays it all out there in black and white. I absolutely adored Reid in this book because he reminded me of my friend, my person, and that made his character even more real to me. I also identified a lot with Millie and her struggle to express herself emotionally; sometimes it is so much easier to bottle everything up than to take the risk of being hurt and rejected, and I can relate to that more than I am willing to admit. This book shows us that sometimes you have to risk it to get the biscuit, and that the biscuit is worth everything fear!
Read My Favorite Half-Night Stand. You will not be sorry.
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