My Best Friend’s Honeymoon is somehow the first book I’ve read by Meryl Wilsner. I enjoyed it a lot and now I get to go read their backlist. I listened to an advance copy narrated by Blair Baker and Emily Shaw. I thought they did a great job bringing the book to life.
Elsie’s fiancé, Derek, plans and schedules the wedding that Elsie has said she’s too busy and overwhelmed to plan. When he shows Elsie the venue and lets her know they are getting married next week, Elsie realizes she doesn’t want to get married. She hadn’t planned the wedding because she didn’t know what she wanted. They break up and Derek suggests Elsie take the prepaid, non refundable honeymoon with her best friend, Ginny, who is nonbinary. Elsie and Ginny have been friends since junior high school. They are each other’s person and Derek has always supported that. Ginny tells Elsie that she needs to practice speaking up for herself and that she can have anything she wants as long as she asks for it.
Side note about Derek – he is a sweetheart and doesn’t really do anything terribly wrong, he’s just not the person that Elsie wants to be partnered with. He is the easy option that Elsie has settled for. At some point in the future, he will meet someone who values him and have a wonderful life. I love a romance with an ex who is a good person but not the right person.
There is a lot of sex in this book. Ginny and Elsie have freed themselves from the constraints of their normal lives and are cocooned in a private, queer friendly bungalow. As Elsie gets braver in asking for what she wants, the sex gets more intense. Every sex scene in this book is essential to the characters and story. Elsie is asking for what she wants from Ginny for the first time with no fear of judgement from others. Ginny is able to indulge her sexual self with Elsie for the first time. Part of the sexual exploration is testing what works for the two of them as lovers, and also exploring a facet of Ginny’s nonbinary selfhood. Elsie is protective of Ginny’s identity so she asks questions about what language to use about Ginny’s body. The two of them get very vulnerable with each other very quickly, and this vulnerability fuels Elsie’s freak out that leads to the third act break up. The sex is essential to the plot and the characters.
Personally, I’ve had some physical issues going on for a while that made some of the sex they have unappealing to me personally. As I realized they were going in that direction, my body tensed unpleasantly and I hit the advance button until they were past those particular scenes. That was me protecting myself. It doesn’t mean those scenes don’t belong, shouldn’t have been written, or that the author is a bad person. It just means that I fast forwarded through them and got on with the book. To recap: there is a lot of sex in the book, it is all important to the story, I didn’t want some of it in my ears, so I fast forwarded and kept going.
Meryl Wilsner did such a great job of sowing the seeds of both the break up and the reconciliation into the whole story. Elsie and Ginny both need to do some growing up. Elsie still needs to learn to speak up for herself with her family and figure out who she can be separate from Ginny. Ginny needs to figure out what they want from their life that’s not centered around Elsie. The part of the book where they are giving each other space is as important as the sex. I thought the story was so well crafted.
My Best Friend’s Honeymoon is out at the end of April but I’m choosing to review it now as part of the Trans Rights Readathon. Meryl Wilsner is out as a nonbinary author who writes romances about loving women. In the last few years as I’ve consciously read books by trans and nonbinary writers, I’ve deepened and strengthened my understanding of identity, selfhood, and bodily autonomy. So much of my understanding of myself has come from the identity and gender roles I was assigned at birth. I am a cis woman, but my understanding of what that means to me is more authentic for having to consider how other people have experienced their bodies and identities differently. I’ve read some truly excellent books that I might not have found if someone hadn’t pointed out that my reading was pretty narrow. The personal growth is the cherry on top.
I received this as an advance listener copy from Macmillan Audio and NetGalley. My opinions are my own, freely and honestly given.