From the description, "Best Men" seemed like a traditional enemies-to-lovers romance -- Max Moody's best friend Paige is getting married, and she seems to be spending more and more time with her fiancé's adorable brother Chasten, much to Max's dismay -- but in truth, Max and Chasten aren't really ever antagonists. They're just... different types of men. Max often feels like he's not the "right" sort of gay to be helping Paige with her wedding, since he doesn't know much about fashion or planning the perfect bridal shower.

Despite the fact that it's stated over and over again that Paige and Max have been close friends since they were kids, I felt Paige was behaving like a bridezilla (example: the way she insists that Max plan some sort of unspecified surprise for her!) and wanted her to get a little more of a comeuppance. The book is fun, light and full of enjoyable quips and banter, though, and the New York setting is authentically drawn.

This was such a fun romcom. Amazing banter and laugh out loud funny. I was drawn into the characters with ease. This is a good MM romance that will tickle your funny bone.

Links to come.

I love snarky writing and this book does no disappoint. Heck, it doesn't even slow down on the snark. I was making amused little snorting noises all the way through.

A "coming of middle age" story about a gay man feeling more lost and lonely as his best pal finds love and purpose in life while he feels he's just "being".

Definitely say give this book a try.

Loved the wedding setting and the fresh take on the "best man finding love" trope with queer characters.

I dnf’d this at 20% and I pushed myself to get there. I really wanted to love Max but I just couldn’t care less about him. The glimpses of Paige make me hope she has an arc, but I’m not willing to find out. Sometimes unfiltered writing is refreshing and hooks me but this one was too much. I think this book needs a good editor.

i wanted to love this one but unfortunately, it didn't land for me! the tone of writing here was really casual, conversational, unfiltered, and a little unpolished, which was at times refreshing and fun and at other times grating and distracting. i felt like nothing happened in the plot, and the characters weren't dynamic enough to really hook me and make this as fun as i had hoped it would be.

This was basically a rip off of Bridesmaids, which sounds exciting…. But this did not deliver. Max was okay as a MMC, Chasten was a cute love interest (but we didn’t get enough of him!) and PAIGE WAS MISERABLE.

At one point Chasten told Max, “I thought this was going to be about you and me, not us and Paige,” and honestly SAME CHASTEN.

Not to mention the paragraphs were so long and hardly infected, so it felt like never ending blocks of texts.

I think this had a lot of promise and could have been great, but it just didn’t do it for me.

"I'm not sure how my entire personality has been boiled down to "gay best friend of woman getting married"."

Similarly to the movie Bridesmaids, Max Moody finds himself in competition with his best friend's fiancé's brother, Chasten, to give his best friend, Paige, the best wedding a man of honor can deliver. However, Max, unhappy with most aspects of his life, has found a bright spot in his wedding archenemy Chasten and can't help but think is this only the beginning of a happy ending for Paige or also himself?

While I've seen Bridesmaids over and over again and can't help but laugh every time, I just wanted Best Man to be over.
If I hadn't been reading this with someone else, I would have DNF.

What I Struggled With:

- The Characters:
I struggled with each and every main character. Mostly because they each felt so underdeveloped and one dimensional.
Immediately, Max comes off whiny and aloof. He is so negative and this book is mostly a stream of consciousness of all his most negative thoughts. He is so unhappy with all aspects of his life at 35 years old and it makes it hard to get through. I wanted to scream YOLO and force him to just do something about it!
Paige is truly an awful best friend. She consistently refers to Max as her "gay bestie" which feels so 2012. She is annoying, indecisive, has no thoughtful statements or contributions to the story, and allows Max to just spiral versus being a real friend to him. Also she can choke because she has historically done awful things to Max at pivotal moments in his life.
I guess Chasten is the love interest? But we barely get to know him and I don't even pick up on him liking Max until the VERY end, when it's all stated in literally a one sentence declaration.

- The Writing/Execution:
This book really just needed an honest editor. The purpose and plot of this story could have been told in 100 pages, since it's only over 350 pages due to the constant exposition and detail dumping. Like come on, there are entire chapters of Max just LAYING PEOPLE OFF THEIR JOBS???
There's so much exposition and wordy detailing about things that feel irrelevant to the story. I do not care about why people from the midwest prefer swimming pools over the ocean or each and every place you stopped while your parents visited the city. It slowed down the read for me and almost forces you to skim.
There were more chapters about layoffs than there were about romance and that should tell you enough about the execution and writing style.

- The "Romance":
I'm not convinced this is a romance, especially when it didn't exist until 90% into the book. Enough said.

As someone who understands the value of M/M romances and has read a slew of them, I wanted to love this one so much, but it just missed the mark.

Thank you Berkley and NetGalley for the advance e-copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.

this was a beautifully done romantic comedy novel, it does what I was looking for from this type of book. Sidney Karger has a great writing style that I wanted to keep reading. I enjoyed getting to know the charatcers and what was going on with them. I'm excited to read more from Sidney Karger.

"This is the in memoriam of people I had to fire today, (set to Sarah McLachlan’s “I Will Remember You”). Some made huge impacts, others contributed the best way they could, and a few just collected a paycheck. I was half-afraid that when I left tonight they’d have formed a line outside the office, waiting to murder me with various Clue weapons."

A witty, fun, and utterly charming queer romance that is very firmly set in New York. I loved spending time with these characters, and was sad to see them go. A perfect summer beach read, and a guaranteed good time.

I think this was a good read. I thought this was going to be something else entirely but It was enjoyable. Paige is the bride and she basically sets up her best friend/best man (Max) with her soon to be husband's best man (Chasten). This was nice in the way that Chasten helps Max figure out a lot about himself.

Thank you to Netgalley and Berkley for access to this arc.


When I was offered the ARC of this book, my first thought was that I was a little intimidated. I mean, a blurb from Anderson Cooper can intimidate me I admit, but then I saw that the book was set in New York, and despite the blurb sounding a little too quirky for my taste, I dived in.

First and foremost I have to say that I am not disappointed in the slightest that I spent time with this story and characters. I also found it to be a very well written story. The writer who can make me stay with the book mostly written in the first person present tense deserves a great deal of praise for that alone.  Overall it just felt that story flew effortlessly.  Here I have to insert my usual apologies for being unable to explain in details why I liked the writing so much.

I also really liked the main characters, but for the life of me I could not figure out the reason for the tension between Max and Paige. I understand that wedding preparations can cause a lot of tensions, please do not get me wrong, and do not blame either Rachel or Max for that. What I could not figure out was the subsequent angst Max was having - not about Rachel getting married, after all he was a decent, sweet guy and it was clear that he was genuinely happy for his friend. He just really wanted to get married and I was ready to forgive him a brief jealousy pout.

No, I was confused about how Max went from that to feeling that all his life he was Rachel's "gay best friend," rather than just her friend. He spent some time angsting over whether that was true or was not true and I just felt like the angst went from something believable to something added to prolong the angst a little bit more than necessary.

I liked Max a whole lot, this is the first time in a long time I am reading about the character working in HR, never mind that he finds this job not very satisfying, it was still sweet to see that he hated firing people.

I thought he and Chasten were fun on page too, for a moment I even thought it would even venture into "from enemies to lovers' territory, but once again, that part evaporated pretty fast and that is okay. I liked their connection and their chemistry.

I smiled a lot while reading this book and I appreciated that.  I also liked how New York popped up on the pages, not necessarily through all the landmarks (to me this is an easy way out at this point, as much as I love my city's famous touristy spots), but for example at some point characters eat lunch in Just Salad (and yes, I find this place annoying too, but so recognizable at this point), or how I thought I recognized the real chocolate factory which the chocolate place one of the characters owns was based on.

dnf @ 37%. Just couldn't get into it. There's nothing inherently dislikable about it. But it's also not particularly gripping.

This is a story about being the main character of your own story.  Max and Paige have been best friends since they were five -- they were neighbors growing up in suburban Chicago, they went to the same college, and now both live in New York City.  When they were growing up, their parents (and even Paige) thought they might end up married -- until Max came out.  Now, Max is Paige's gay best friend, talking every day and regularly going out for splunch (a splurge lunch -- they both object to the word brunch).

Then, Paige informs Max that she is getting married.  Max is shocked -- partially as a result of her parents' turbulent romantic lives (divorced, they both have had several marriages between them), Paige has seemed reluctant to commit.  And Max always viewed himself as the more romantic of the two.  To make matters even worse, Paige's fiance has a gay younger brother, Chasten.  Chasten is everything that Max is not -- outgoing, ridiculously handsome, knowledgeable about clothes and wedding planning, and the life of every party.  Max immediately feels a rivalry with Chasten, especially as Paige relies on Chasten more and more to help with wedding planning.  

Max knows that, as Paige's man of honor, he needs to maintain the peace with Chasten, his brother's best man, but it is hard to do when Chasten seems to be becoming Paige's new gay best friend.  As the two spend more and more time together, though, Max finds there is more to Chasten than he initially thought -- and he can't help but notice that a spark seems to be developing between the two of them.  But as the bride and groom's best men, they feel the need to avoid anything that would take attention away from the wedding festivities even as their rivalry seems to be turning into something more.

I loved this book!  It is both a highly engaging romantic comedy, and also an insightful exploration of friendship and work. What sets this novel apart is how the author excels equally at portraying the romance and the friendship at the heart of this story.  In some ways, the central relationship in the book is between Max and Paige and the book portrays that friendship with a nuance that is rare.  You understand how their long history and shared experiences both create the foundation for their strong bond, but also inhibit their relationship from evolving even as they each change. 

In terms of the relationship between Max and Chasten, I appreciated how to both Max and the reader, Chasten at first seems like a caricature of a particular type of gay man in New York.  But over the course of the story, both Max and we come to see that Chasten is much more than he first appeared -- and, indeed, many of Max's initial impressions had more to do with his own insecurities than anything else.  I also appreciated how the book portrays work -- while Paige, her fiance, and Chasten all have jobs that would not be out of place in a Hallmark movie, Max has a more typical job.  The author captures how Max, like so many people, stayed at a job much longer than he expected and now finds himself spending his days doing something that is both frequently mundane and far from what he imagined for himself.  Finally, the lists and graphics between the chapters were a delight -- I frequently found myself laughing out loud.

Very highly recommended!

Max thought he had everything figured out and is living his best life in New York with his best friend Paige. Max is everything Paige could ask for in a gay best friend and they’ve been inseparable since they were five. When Paige suddenly announces she’s getting married, Max is thrown for a loop.

Things go sideways when Max meets Paige’s fiances brother, Chasten. The other night, where things had not got well, comes rushing back to Max when they’re introduced. As Max, the introverted Midwesterner struggles to help Paige with her wedding, he’s annoyed to learn that Chasten excels at wedding planning. When Max realizes that his annoyance is actually romantic sparks, will the two supporting men in Paige’s life turn to leading men for each other?

What a fun book that I didn’t want to put down. The banter between all the characters was top notch. Max was hilarious and I loved the excerpts from his job as an HR manager. I can’t even imagine the stress that he is under as the company faces lay-offs and he’s the one to deliver the news. It was something I felt really humanized and made Max relatable. I loved reading this story from his point of view. The only thing I wish would have been a little different in this one, I wish it wasn’t a closed door romance, and there was some more spice. Overall, highly recommend.

Check out this amazing debut novel by Sidney Karger on May 2nd!

Thank you to the publisher Berkley Publishing, @berkleypub, @berkleyromance and Netgalley @netgalley for this e-ARC in exchange for an honest review.

A cute love story. It has a certain boyfriend material vibe but not quite as funny. The Fire Island part just made me want a beach vacation real bad.

Funny and sweet...reads a bit like a dream... delicious food descriptions and lots of pop culture...

I really liked this book! It was fun and I couldn’t put it down! I liked the growth between characters and really getting to know them for who they are. I really liked how different personalities really complimented each other. This book feels like it would be a really great beach read this summer!

First of all, I would like to say that “himbo” was absolutely 100% not a thing in the year 2003, so I hope some copy or line-editor catches that before this book goes to print. And no, don’t argue with me that it was first used in the 1980s (1988 specifically) and uses of it date from then, but it was absolutely not a term that anyone who was fourteen years old in 2003 would have known. The internet popularized it and repurposed it, around 2020.

I find myself talking about the above issue more than I should because I don’t want to write the rest of this review. This is the third three-star book I’ve read in 2023, and I’ve only read five books so far. And this is the second ARC three-star. And I’m probably being generous with my three-star rating here. They’re going to stop giving me ARCs. I can’t really pinpoint anything wrong with the book, though, hence three stars. I just didn’t really enjoy myself very much. There was something off about it for me, something negative. I felt bad while reading this book.

Also, I never connected emotionally with any of the characters or the plot. Which is a huge deal.

This is a romance about man named Max whose best friend Paige is getting married and he’s acting as her best man/man of honor, while a younger more classically “gay” and handsome man, the brother of the groom, is the best man. Oh, and also they had a disastrous hookup before they knew who the other was. Now they have to work together to help Paige plan her wedding. (Sidenote: Not sure where the author got the idea that it was one of the duties of the best man/maid of honor to help plan the wedding; it’s really not. They can help when asked, but it’s still the main purview of the bride and groom, and any assorted wedding planners.)

But Chasten (the brother, lord what a name) isn’t really the problem. The problem is the narrator, Max, who is a negative Nancy. He’s unhappy in his job, he’s unhappy with his body, he’s unhappy in love (dumped by long-term boyfriend who he still hooks up with occasionally), he’s unhappy about how his gayness manifests and how he’s perceived in the regard by other gay men (which could have been really interesting to explore! I, too, would rather have a quiet night at home than go to a smelly loud bar, and the removal of body hair and keeping up with expensive fashions, etc. sounds exhausting). The narrative is dripping with his negative unhappiness.

Worth noting, a lot of this is addressed by the end, but I was so annoyed and miserable along with the narrator for most of the book, that the ending didn’t really do anything for me. You still need to be on the narrator’s side even while they’re making the poor choices and experiencing troubles in their lives. At least, in a romance you do. Probably having a Chasten POV would have helped balance things out, and also give us a hint as to why Chasten would like, let alone end up with, Max. But we just had Max the whole time.

All of this is of course, YMMV.

Lastly, I do want to express some dismay that while I have been wanting to read more romances by male authors, this is not the result I was wanting. I comfort myself that if Alexis Hall exists, there have to be more male authors who are similarly talented waiting in the wings.

[2.5 stars, talked myself into lowering it a half star while writing this review]

A voicey, delightful summer read. I love wedding stories, and this one is wonderfully queer and funny, laced with tender moments and wisdom. I think romance fans will adore it.