Happily Never After by Lynn Painter // Book Review

There was something about the premise that really drew me to this book; a set of wedding objectors that go around stopping weddings before they tie the knot. But what you get is so much more and at the same time, not enough.

Here’s more about Happily Never After

When Sophie Steinbeck finds out just before her nuptials that her fiancé has cheated yet again, she desperately wants to call it off. But because her future father-in-law is her dad’s cutthroat boss, she doesn’t want to be the one to do it. Her savior comes in the form of a professional objector, whose purpose is to show up at weddings and proclaim the words no couple (usually) wants to hear at their ceremony: “I object!”

During anti-wedding festivities that night, Sophie learns more about Max the Objector’s job. It makes perfect sense to her: he saves people from wasting their lives, from hurting each other. He’s a modern-day hero. And Sophie wants in.

The two love cynics start working together, going from wedding to wedding, and Sophie’s having more fun than she’s had in ages. She looks forward to every nerve-racking ceremony saving the lovesick souls of the betrothed masses. As Sophie and Max spend more time together, however, they realize that their physical chemistry is off the charts, leading them to dabble in a little hookup session or two—but it’s totally fine, because they definitely do not have feelings for each other. Love doesn’t exist, after all.

And then everything changes. A groom-to-be hires Sophie to object, but his fiancée is the woman who broke Max’s heart. As Max wrestles with whether he can be a party to his ex’s getting hurt, Sophie grapples with the sudden realization that she may have fallen hard for her partner in crime.

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My thoughts

I felt like I was reading two books at once here. One book was about a pair of objectors who meet when Sophie needs an objector for her own wedding. From there, they begin a friendship (and more) that go to weddings to professionally object. They’re not malicious in anyway. They’re hired by the bride or groom to stop a wedding before it happens because of some sadder truth that’s revealed to one or the other. If the book was more about this random pairing that goes off and objects at weddings and the hijinks they come across during that time, then I would have been more than satisfied.

But (and this is a big but), there’s a huge component of this book where Sophie does not believe in love and sees relationships as more a transactional partnership between two people who are compatible enough to build a life together. I love the reluctant love kind of story as well because it takes the entire book to convince them that love is real. It just so happened to be shoe-horned into this book.

Because it felt like there were two stories happening at the same time, it didn’t feel like there was enough space dedicated to one or the other. I was so excited to read the objector parts, but they were so few and far between. Most of this book is about Sophie’s inability to believe in love, which felt odd because the first scene was Max objecting to her wedding and her being pretty beat up about the circumstances of her relationship.

It was still a good story, but honestly I wish it followed the objector plot a bit more.