This is my second Jasmine Guillory novel this year and I think I preferred this to The Proposal. (It's really close, though; it's like choosing between The Godfather and The Godfather Part II, not like choosing between real food and McDonald's.)

This book is just a complete delight. On the one hand, I wish I had read it sooner but on the other, I'm really glad I read it when I did. It makes the world seem much less November-gray.

We didn't spend all that much time with Alexa in The Proposal and that's too bad because I absolutely fell in love with her in this book. She's fantastic and her job is in politics, which I am oddly jealous of. 

I am ALSO now even more excited about The Wedding Party, which is a companion novel to this and centers around Maddie and Theo. I am all in for that and everything else she writes.

Highly recommended.

I liked this one, but the more I read the less I was in love with it. If I'm honest I liked the wedding part the most. After the wedding there were things I liked and things I was meh on. Part of the problem I think was the hype. Some many people told me it was a me book and it just missed the mark. I look forward to reading more from this author through.

The Wedding Date was so fun! Reminiscent of lighthearted rom-coms. The main characters were so lovable, and their banter was adorable. Also I loved how much they ate in the book and it always made me hungry haha! I can't wait for more from Jasmine Guillory.

This was a cute, fun, quick read! I loved the concept and the characters were likable. But OMG SO MUCH FOOD. I almost got a stomachache trying to keep up with how much food everyone was eating all the time.

I read and decided not to finish The Proposal by this same author, but I'd heard so many great things about this book that I gave it a try. However, I felt this suffered from the same issues as her second book. The dialogue was unnatural and stilted, and the banter, while witty, was altogether too much. I think the story had the potential to be interesting, but the lackluster writing kept me from finishing it.

I've been putting off reading this because I got into the first two chapters the first time and felt a little underwhelmed with everything, so I put it aside for a better mood.

I finally finished this last night and um, I still feel underwhelmed. The character setup and the meet-cute should have been my thing, yet I felt disconnected with them and the story as a whole. Objectively speaking, this is a well-written book, and I'm bummed that I didn't love the characters and the story as much as I expected to.

I did not finish this book, and will not be posting an official review on my website. I liked the characters well enough, and I appreciated the diversity of the characters. I just wasn't connecting with anything, and felt the story to be pretty uneventful. I decided to throw in the towel when, at 37%, I still wasn't enjoying the story.

Though I liked the book, I made the decision at the time I finished not to review it on my site. Maybe in the future I will include it in a book list post or another article.

This enjoyable quick read felt like reading a quick romance but in an elevated form. The characters were real and experienced growth and they had sex and enjoyed it and it told us about it. Overall I highly recommend this selection.

Rounding up to 5 stars because it's hard to believe this came from a first-time novelist. I'm not the biggest fan of romance novels, but this book has been hyped all the way up and it deserves every accolade. It's super fun and frothy without being totally mindless.

Guillory is from the San Francisco Bay Area and oh boy does it show. As a Bay Area native, I can say this is easily the most Bay book ever. The characters are constantly eating and in great detail; In-N-Out gets namechecked constantly, and the handful of restaurants that aren't explicitly named are described so well it's clear where Alexa likes to get ice cream. I loved it.

After several tries, I put the book down. The author does a great job putting together a story, but I had problems with both characters and ended up not liking them enough to continue.

“Alexa Monroe walked into the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco that Thursday night wearing her favorite red heels...”

I loved so much about The Wedding Date! Like, oh my word, what a damn treat! Seriously friends, I know this cover screams Valentine’s Day, but this is the perfect summer read! Jasmine Guillory’s beautiful debut novel stars two people who take an elevator ride that will change their lives.

➽ Drew Nichols - Pediatric Doctor from Los Angeles, white, and freaking out that he is in San Francisco to attend the wedding of his best friend to his ex, dateless. Oh, and Drew doesn’t do girlfriends.

➽ Alexa Monroe - Lawyer, and now Berkley’s mayor’s chief of staff, black, and just trying to get to her sister’s hotel to celebrate her graduation. But Alexa is too busy with her career to risk her heart.

And while Drew and Alexa are stranded, and bonding over crackers and expensive cheese that Alexa had in her purse because she’s my damn idol, Drew realizes that Alexa might just make the perfect wedding date to the wedding he is dreading.

You all know this is a romance book, so you all know where this is going. And, Lord, it’s adorable. But you also know what it is? Important. Alexa constantly checks Drew on his privilege. And for the most part, he understands and learns from it. From Drew letting Alexa know if she is going to be the only black person at an event, to Drew realizing the different opportunities and free passes he had growing up just based off his skin color. This book has so much good inside it.

“White men hated it when you reminded them of their privilege”

This book also puts a spotlight on how important it is for us to work with underprivileged youth, especially from low-income areas. Not only was Alexa smart, beautiful, and successful, she also went the extra mile for what she was passionate about and what she believed in. Systemic oppression is real, and I loved how the author found a way to shine a light on it in a steamy romance book.

“I know, but Drew, you’re a white guy. Life is different for you. You were born with a benefit of the doubt that black kids never get.”

And even though I was completely living for this romance in every way possible, my only real “critique” of this book is that it has somewhat fade to black sex scenes that just kind of feel abrupt and disjointed. Like, the sexual angst, tension, and scenes are all there, but it just doesn’t feel as good getting a few sentences of what is happening and then *bam* they are back to doing whatever they were doing before, or whatever new activity after. This is honestly my only real complaint about this book. But this book is really sex positive, and I was here for that from start to finish!

The only other kind of side-eye I have going on is because Drew didn’t realize how amazing Alexa was right away. And sometimes it seemed like his friend Carlos was the best wing man in the entire world and deserved just as much credit as Drew! Also, side-note, The Proposal is about Carlos, Drew’s colleague and friend, and my heart is so damn happy.

Also, food is brought up constantly in this. Like, I was highkey hungry every time I picked this book up! In my opinion, I think this book is really food positive, too, but there is also a constant discussion about Alexa’s body in this book. And even though I think it’s super well done and empowering, I can also see how it could be triggering for some. Also, trigger and content warnings sexual content, for racist comments that are always challenged, and talk of disease diagnosis for a child (I know this is specific, but it’s one of two triggers that I personally have).

Overall, I loved this. And you know I’m always here for the fake dating trope done right! And Alexa was a treat to read about, and she deserves the entire world. Also, this is completely irrelevant and unprofessional, but Jasmine Guillory is honestly the cutest author in the damn world. Seeing her author picture at the end? Oh my word, what a confirmed angel! Also, I can’t wait to read the The Proposal and everything else this author creates, because The Wedding Date was such a blessing.

The ARC of this book was provided by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.
I loved The Wedding Date! The pacing was spot on, I never lost interest in the characters, the relationship, or where the story was headed. I also liked that while the book didn’t hide the fact that the couple was interracial, it was just a fact of the relationship and not the reason for any relationship issues the couple encountered, and everything was handled in a believable, realistic manner. So glad it had a happy ending! I can’t wait for the authors next book!

A delightful romance! Fun and charming with likable, real characters. A perfect one day read. Recommend!

This book is good to read on a road trip or while on vacation. My library has purchased copies of this book. I'd recommend via readers advisory.

The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory is romantic, sweet, and so relatable--a shining star for contemporary romance!

Hype may have killed this book for me maybe. I'd heard so much praise for this one, which definitely raised my expectations. Though, honestly, I'm not sure if, even with low expectations, I would have liked this one much.

Romance is a hard genre to write, because pretty much everything depends on whether or not the reader believes in the love between the couple. If you're not invested in the leads or not invested in them together, there's generally not a lot to really make that reading experience delightful. And, unfortunately, I very much unshipped Drew and Alexa.

Alexa works for me on paper. She's Black, she's a lawyer, and she's working in government. Her biggest goal in the novel isn't landing a boyfriend but getting her community to agree to help at-risk teens. I absolutely love that, and I think the concept there is on point. I just don't think her characterization is totally solid, and she spends a lot more time thinking about how fat she is than being the boss that she is. I absolutely get body image issues, and they're a fucking bitch to deal with, but I wanted to see her make progress on that or at least have it not be her most significant character trait.

Drew on the other hand I didn't like much to begin with and hated by the end. Sure, he's a hot doctor who works with kids, but he's such a walking cliche. He doesn't do relationships and he's dated basically every hot woman he's ever met, but suddenly he has massive feelings for this woman he met in an elevator. This cliche can work, but Drew has so little characterization. He says/thinks a bunch of times about how he dumps women when things are going well because he doesn't want them to end up hating him, but there's no indication of where this comes from. His inciting incident (his ex-girlfriend from college and bestie from college getting hitches) isn't the source of this, because he dumped her while she was in love with him. Maybe it's related to his parents (most things are), but they're never mentioned. I don't know why he's like this, so he just seems like an asshole.

Together, Alexa and Drew lack any sort of chemistry outside of the physical. Their banter is lacking in vibrancy and I don't feel a real emotional connection between them. They do ask each other about what's going on in their daily lives and remember a few basic details, but other than that, they're constantly fraught. They don't communicate, instead bottling feelings up, acting out and then apologizing, or storming out. Alexa's a bit jealous, but Drew's massively jealous of every other guy in her life, including her male best friend Theo and Drew's best friend Carlos. They find jealousy a sign of caring, but it's actually more a sign of a lack of trust. In the end, they wouldn't even be together had Carlos and a patient's mom not given him pep talks to get his head out of his ass. I hate hate hate that the mom of a kid with cancer had to spend time talking the doctor through his love life.

I'm thrilled that an interracial romance with a Black heroine is so successful, but I think Alexa deserves so much more than a jealous asshat.

This is a super cute romance. When Alexa is stuck in an elevator with handsome stranger Drew, the spark is instant. He’s going to the wedding of an ex-girlfriend and former best friend, and he doesn’t have a date. After knowing each other for only a short time, he asks if she’d want to be his pretend girlfriend. She agrees because it’s only a couple days, and then he’ll fly back to LA while she stays in Bay Area.

There is a lot of sex, which I don’t normally like reading, but this isn’t raunchy, it’s tender and romantic. However, there was way too much of this stuff for my taste. While everything is well done, I found myself getting bored about halfway through and skipped to the last twenty percent of the book, which ends like you’d imagine.

If you’re looking for a cute, light-hearted read, Guillory does a great job of writing the race differences between the couple, and this is a fun book.

4 With Respect and Effort Stars
* * * * Spoiler Free
What is it about confined spaces...Stuck Elevators...They can either make us panic and become unreasonable...or we could connect and become a fake wedding date!

This was the cute premise for The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory. We were there when Alexa Monroe meets Drew Nichols in one of those confined quarters I mentioned. Both of these serious career people happen to get stuck in an hotel elevator. During the wait to be rescued, enough conversation and friendly banter takes place to make Alex comfortable to share he has to experience his ex's wedding...Before anyone can realize the gravity of what is to come, a fake date for the wedding is happening and Alexa is all in.

What happens is the attraction and interest between two people who are equals- he a pediatric surgeon and she, chief of staff for Berkely's mayor. You have two wonders. They are talented, focused and committed to their careers. Perfect, right...

Well, there is a little complication... Drew is that pediatric surgeon but in Los Angeles...Yup, a long distance relationship in the making...with all of the hurdles to overcome.

This was a very enjoyable read... and it also mixed in real life issues without making them feel as if they were written in bold... they were part of the overall story and meaningful in the regular course of the relationship. A true story telling experience.

Lucky us, they is a book coming and it focuses on Drew's best friend, Carlos!

The Wedding Date is charming and delightful, and it saved me from getting overly hysterical on a flight to Costa Rica. It’s not a perfect book, and I found myself giving the hero my “WTF” face a few times, but the awesomeness of the heroine thrilled me.

To give you some context, for me, flying is essentially a panic attack from take off to landing. I can take two Xanax to soften the impending misery, but if we hit turbulence I start to cry a little. Or throw up. It’s not great. Yet I was on a five hour flight, and The Wedding Date kept me distracted for most of it; it’s got some powerful charm.

The book opens with a meet cute. Alexa Monroe is headed to her sister’s hotel room to pregame a night out with some cheese, crackers, and champagne. She gets stuck in the hotel elevator with Drew Nichols, who is there for a wedding.

They sit down, share some cheese, and charm the hell out of each other. Drew is there to be a groomsman in the wedding of his ex-girlfriend and one of his best friends. Awkward. And he’s there without a date. Even more awkward. They discuss over brie and crackers:

“Oh, please, you’ll be fine. Weddings are a great place to meet people. It’s better that you’re without a date. As my friend Colleen always says, ‘Don’t bring a sandwich to a buffet.”

He let out a bark of laughter.

“I’m definitely going to steal that saying. And while in most situations I would say that your friend Colleen is totally right, this is that five percent of situations where a sandwich would save me from all the food poisoning in the buffet. I’m going to get so many pitying looks, you have no idea. And the worst part is that I RSVP’d with a plus-one, so there’s going to be an empty seat at the head table. And a lot of ‘What happened to your girlfriend, Drew, couldn’t make it?’ And I’m going to have to smile and take it, but there’s like a thirty percent possibility I’m going to have one too many glasses of bourbon and go rogue.”

She touched his hand and tried not to linger there.

“Okay, yes, sometimes a sandwich is a necessary security blanket. I’m sorry that yours bailed on you.”

Giddy with delightful flirtation, Alexa agrees to be Drew’s sandwich. That is, she agrees to pretend to be his girlfriend for the weekend of the wedding.

For the record, if I were trapped in an elevator with Chris Evans and he tried to convince me to be his sandwich at a wedding, I’d refuse because weddings are super awful, especially when you’re in them. There’s, like, a lot of people and a lot of talking. And a lot of talking to people you don’t know. And sitting around waiting for stuff when it’s not polite to pull out your Kindle because you should be talking to people you don’t know. I might do it for Tom Hiddleston but only because I have suspicions about his niceness, and I need to stay on his good side.

Anyway, Alexa is a better woman than me, and she goes to the wedding with Drew. The delightful flirting continues. Drew delays his flight back to LA so he can spend more time with Alexa. They really, really like each other.

But Drew is a pediatric surgeon in LA. Alexa is the Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Berkley, California. They are both really busy professionals dedicated to their careers–but they can’t stop thinking about each other.

So Alexa and Drew either have the BEST frequent flyer miles program ever or they spend a good amount of money and fly out to see each other every other weekend. This book is fairly light on conflict. To be honest a good portion of it was the progress of Drew and Alexa dating and slowly falling in love, but it was sweet and funny and felt like a very real depiction of two professionals in their thirties staring a relationship. Also a lot of that dating involves really incredible food, so do not read while hungry. I want brie and crackers right now, damnit.

Probably the thing I loved most about this book was how Alexa loves and is devoted to her job, and that she’s allowed to be that way without criticism from any other character. So often I see the trope of professional women in contemporary romance “working too hard” and failing to fall in love because of it. That’s such bullshit. It is entirely possible to be a busy and dedicated professional and still have a fulfilling relationship. The idea that it’s not possible is centered only around women and it’s based on old misogynist cassette tapes that are still playing.

Also Alex and Drew actually work. This isn’t a book where the CEO/ small business owner/ FBI agent remarkably has a fuckton of free time to do other stuff. Alexa and Drew mostly meet on the weekends, and even then work comes up. Drew has to run off to an emergency (like a surgeon would). Alexa spends one of their nights together working on a project while Drew chills out on the couch next to her.

It’s such a realistic depiction of actual work life balance, and it was so heartening for me to read. I come home from work all the time only to have some problem at my office go ka-boom and derail all my plans, and there are plenty of nights when my husband and I have watched a movie while I’ve worked from my end of the couch. There’s no shame in enjoying your work or in having to make room for it within your personal life.

Alexa also has a “work husband,” Theo, whom she bounces ideas and insecurities off of. I loved the depiction of a man and a woman in a professional relationship that, while deep, isn’t sexual or romantic. I also loved that Alexa had those insecurities in the first place. A lot of time I see powerful women presented as being in control and unaffected by doubt all of the time which is such bullshit. Basically this book made Work Elyse all the happy.

For a decent portion of the book we get Alexa and Drew trying to balance their careers, the distance between them, and the fact that they are an interracial couple. Alexa is Black and Drew is White. Alexa spends a lot of time with Drew’s friends who are 99.8% White, and it’s not always a comfortable situation. Like this asshole that she meets at a party:

“You live in Berkley? That’s cool. But I meant, like, where are you really from?”

Now she knew where this was going. Like she couldn’t “really” be from California? Why did people always try to ask her about her ethnicity in the clumsiest of all possible ways? Getting this question, especially this way, always made her feel like an object of curiosity. Today it made her feel like even more of an Other in this party full of golden-haired beauty queens.

Now she was doubly annoyed with Mr. Stands Too Close. So she was going to fuck with him.

“Oh, not that far from here. I grew up in Oakland. Northern California girl!” She gave him her biggest, fakest grin.

He chuckled and took another swig of his beer.

“No, no like where are you from from? Where are your parents from?”

This conversation was so predictable. Yet this dance people did was irritating every time.

In this scene Drew shows up and The Asshole fucks off, but Drew isn’t aware of how different life is for a woman of color than it is for him except in a superficial way. There are scenes where Alexa has to explain to him how much his perceptions are steeped in privilege.

Alexa is trying to put together an arts program for at-risk youth, a program she’s deeply passionate about. With the dexterity of a Cirque de Soleil performer, Drew shoves his foot deeply into his mouth when he wonders why troubled kids should be rewarded with art classes. I wanted to smack him. Alexa points out that as a White kid, and a man, Drew could do a lot of shit in his teenage years that was dismissed as boys being boys. A Black teenager would face harsher judgment, and be labeled much faster and more permanently as “delinquent.” Alexa is trying to change that narrative.

That’s not the only time Drew says something ignorant or unkind, which was part of the reason I was lukewarm on him. He has the occasional case of “speak first, think later.” My bigger issue was that Drew and Alexa’s conflict was centered around Drew not being able to commit and both of them refusing to label their relationship. The problem was that we are given no context for why Drew doesn’t commit, and not-talking combined with misunderstanding lead to the romantic crisis. All of that could have been avoided with an hour-long honest conversation.

That said, I adored Alexa so much, loved the depiction of her as a professional, loved her friends and coworkers (a heroine who doesn’t exist in a vacuum!) so much that it overcame much of my annoyance at the conflict (and at Drew). Add to that a really powerful exploration of Alexa’s troubled relationship with her sister, Olivia, and I was sold. The relationships between women in this book were strong and loving and kind, and I was so there for that.

And yeah, sometimes Drew was an idiot, but he was also charming enough that I didn’t want to throw him out the door. Throw something at his head, maybe, but I was still happy when he and Alexa made it work.

I really enjoyed The Wedding Date and I’m very much looking forward to seeing more from the author.