The Worst Best Man by Mia Sosa
Genre: NA Realistic Fiction/Rom-Com
Blurb (on back of book):
A wedding planner left at the altar. Yeah, the irony isn’t lost on Carolina Santos, either. But despite that embarrassing blip from her past, Lina’s managed to make other people’s dreams come true as a top-tier wedding coordinator in DC. After impressing an influential guest, she’s offered an opportunity that could change her life. There’s just one hitch… she has to collaborate with the best (make that worst) man from her own failed nuptials. Tired of living in his older brother’s shadow, marketing expert Max Hartley is determined to make his mark with a coveted hotel client looking to expand its brand. Then he learns he’ll be working with his brother’s whip-smart, stunning —absolutely off-limits — ex-fiancée. And she loathes him.
If they can survive the next few weeks and nail their presentation without killing each other, they’ll both come out ahead. Except Max has been public enemy number one ever since he encouraged his brother to jilt the bride, and Lina’s ready to dish out a little payback of her own.
But even the best laid plans can go awry, and soon Lina and Max discover animosity may not be the only emotion creating sparks between them. Still, this star-crossed couple can never be more than temporary playmates because Lina isn’t interested in falling in love and Max refuses to play runner-up to his brother ever again...
MY OPINION: **
I am going to be honest and state that I absolutely do not remember anything that happened in this book. I read it in the span of 1-2 days and it was a spur of the moment sort of thing after going through a horrible reading slump and struggling to finish a couple of other more... boring books. Although I'm always up for a good rom-com, this one wasn't my favorite, mainly because I didn't really like the tropes or the characters and the chemistry just wasn't there for me.
Lina was left behind the morning of her wedding by her ex-fiance, Andrew. Since then, she's changed careers and mindsets about love and chooses to focus on herself rather than on finding that love match that she thought she had with Andrew. To make matters worse, Andrew's brother and best man is the one who not only broke the news to Lina but also apparently persuaded Andrew to dump her (in a drunken haze).
Lina has the wild opportunity to gain a higher-paying and overall better job than the one she has now as a small wedding planner at a hotel. However, she soon finds out she will have to work with Andrew and Max (the brother) to develop the best pitch for the job. I personally am not a fan of this forced-proximity, working-together sort of trope because it's very unrealistic and overdone, in my opinion.
Lina ends up working with Max while Andrew works with her competitor and she has a lot of preconceptions about Max that are soon foiled as she starts to get to know him better. To be quite honest, I wasn't a fan of either Lina or Max, both of whom seemed quite 2-dimensional to me and didn't have a lot of depth. I didn't see the adorable, loving, soft-on-the-inside man we were all supposed to be seeing and Lina was too uptight to be likeable. I think the lack of character depth and the even lesser lack of chemistry in the relationship made this book less enjoyable than I would have expected from a rom-com.
I did like the inclusion of Brazilian culture and Portuguese since I didn't know much about the language or culture before. I also liked how Lina's personage as a woman of color didn't make up who she was but was still highlighted as a core part of her character and a cause of many of her struggles throughout this book.
TikTok told me that this book was going to give me all of the butterflies and sparks that most other rom-coms seem to offer but I unfortunately was not feeling it with this one. It wasn't that the book was bad, it was just that the usual emotions and squealing and smiles that I usually feel when reading rom-coms was just not there for me. I sped through this one quite quickly but there were times when I seriously considered DNF-ing because of how much it seemed to drag on. I think it was mostly because I was not a fan of the characters, which made the book a lot less interesting for me.
To be quite honest, I think this book took a trope and ran with it, not bothering to make it unique and instead making it as cliche and sugary-sweet as possible. I'm a fan of angst and a little tweaking here and there of the common rom-com tropes, but this one really made me realize why the trope is a trope.
I just heard this book is apparently going to be a movie which I will be watching (since I love to hate on book-to-movie rom-com adaptations) but I'm not sure how this one made it over the many other brilliant romance novels I've read and have yet to read.
I would recommend this book to readers looking for a short, fast-paced rom-com.
Main Character: Lina, Max
Sidekick(s): Family, friends, etc
Villain(s): Misunderstandings, hatred, etc
Realistic Fiction Elements: This book was all very real to life.
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