Happily Never After is the latest adult romance book by Lynn Painter about two characters who don’t believe in love and I’m sharing all of my thoughts on the book in this review. Check it out below to see if this most anticipated romance book of 2024 is worth reading!
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Happily Never After
by Lynn Painter
Category: Contemporary Romance
Tags: Weddings
Published March 2024
Amazon | Goodreads
Rating: ★★★★
Book Boyfriend: ★★★★
Happily Never After Summary:
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 enlists the help of a professional objector, whose purpose is to show up at weddings and proclaim “I object!”
After learning more about his job, Sophie teams up with Max and the two love cynics start going from wedding to wedding, while trying to ignore their off-the-charts chemistry. But when a groom-to-be hires Sophie to object at a wedding that involves the woman who broke Max’s heart, she realizes that she may have fallen hard for her partner in crime.
Happily Never After: My Review
Painter delivers another fun romcom that totally hits the spot!
Lynn Painter became a must-read author for me in 2023 after reading The Love Wager because I adored her writing, the story pacing and the chemistry of her characters. That’s why Happily Never After became one of my most anticipated new romance books of 2024 and its fun storyline did not disappoint.
What happens when one person who doesn’t believe in love and another person who hates love and relationships meet and fall for one another? Well, you get one fun story that has you hooked until the very end.
I absolutely loved how Sophie and Max meet. Max is hired to object at Sophie’s wedding because she finds out that her fiancé has cheated on her again and she can’t call off the wedding herself given that her father works for her fiance’s father.
So Max gets her out of her nuptials by objecting and that night they end up drinking together and Sophie notes that she could have a lot of fun objecting at weddings too. When Max gets another wedding gig that he could use her help on they reconnect and the rest is history.
The whole business about objecting at weddings was such a fun hook to the story and it was super cute to see them at work. Of course, the entire need for them to object only solidifies their respective attitudes toward love and marriage and yet hanging out together only fuels their attraction and chemistry together.
Turns out that they use this to their advantage – pretending to be more than just friends for her boss’s sake (as she wants a promotion and needs to demonstrate better work/life balance) and her his parent’s sake as his dad won’t retire and they won’t move to Florida until they think he’s “settled.”
So throw in some fake dating and some hot chemistry and a shared belief about love never being enough and you’ve got two people who are just really fun and easy to root for.
While their backstories aren’t long as to why they don’t believe in love, I didn’t need them to be. The focus was more on seeing how these two really fit one another and if they could just get over their “no-relationship” hang-ups they could really be happy together since they already are.
Throw in some geriatric roommates for some comic relief and a much-needed heart-to-heart and the novel was an easy read that I really enjoyed.
I think this would be a light, fun summer read since it has the focus on weddings but I recommend it for any time of year.
*Thanks to Netgalley for the advanced reader copy. All opinions are my own.
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