My Favorite Half-Night Stand
Christina Lauren
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.
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Actually didn't love this book as well as other Christina Lauren books? I can't put my finger on why though!
Some of my favorite parts are the scenes of friendship and when all 4 guys are together! Wanted more of that constantly!
I think it wasn't very sexy, which is different than both the Wild Seasons and Beautiful Bastard series. This felt more PG-13. Yes there was sex but it was behind closed door sex, the fade to black kind. I didn't mind that so much BUT the times that it happened were all sort of sprung on the reader? It didn't seem like there was enough tension and build-up to the sex. While both Millie and Reid had times when they were thinking sexually about the other person, the sex happened spontaneously and was quickly dealt with and the characters separated.
It felt like most of the agonizing was not the "sexy, burning, unrequited love" angle but more a "is our friendship okay?/awkward!" angle.
The book was more of a Rom-Com than a romance, using more tropes than I've felt from other books from these authors.
That being said, I did like that Reid was so emotionally sensitive and that Millie was not, this was a nice reversal from a more "traditional" woman is the emotional one.
However, I didn't understand Millie as much as I would have liked to--the fact that she had to step up and be there at 12 for her younger sister and play mom in my opinion should have made... well shoot, now I can't remember what I'd been thinking while reading it. It was toward the end and she was talking about opening up and how being the mother figure hindered that but my instinct was the opposite, that she should have had a better relationship emotionally with her sister? I can't remember, don't care.
Millie was frustrating to me--I get her being somewhat emotionally unavailable, but to not be able to share SO MUCH of her life felt like this was taken to an extreme, and not in a good way.
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