Review: Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating

• Title: Josh & Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating

• Author: Christina Lauren

• Series: N/A

• Genre: Contemporary Romance

• Rating: ☆☆☆

• *This review contains spoilers in the last segment. *

“I like being your person.”

Did I like this novel? Yes. It was different from so many other worlds I’ve read recently, and Hazel as the main protagonist was a breath of fresh air. Did I fall into the usual magic of Christina Lauren’s writing, though? No. I did not, and I’m disappointed by that. I had high hopes going into this book, but it just wasn’t for me. This author duo knows how to write and have the ability to take any idea and make it believable. Both Josh and Hazel were fully fleshed out characters that I could imagine well, and their friendship felt real. Plot wise, this was a fun little world around two opposites who start as friends and end up as lovers. I love this trope so much, so I expected to fall in love with this world. I loved the concept of both of them setting the other up with blind dates to get out of their singledom status and that each double blind date ended with them spending more time together. Essentially they were dating each other all along, which I did really like as a storyline. But it just seemed to fall apart a little for me along the way. Whilst I loved how unashamedly herself Hazel was, and that she was unlike most FL in romance novels, sometimes it felt that the eccentricities went too far, and that cheapened her character. It also got very repetitive that she held Josh up like some God in her eyes and continued to diminish her own worth of being a good match for her best friend. I’m all for some healthy self-doubt, but the more she insisted she wasn’t right for him because she was so weird, the more I wondered if she was truly comfortable with who she was. Whilst there wasn’t anything about Josh that bothered me as much, I didn’t feel the usual, “I love CLo men!” with him. I do wonder if this stems from the fact that I personally enjoy Kpop/Korean culture and could tell Josh was modelled off of Jimin from BTS, and that felt a little cringey to me? Even if that wasn’t the intention, I couldn’t really separate the two. I know Jimin is a name not just used by Park Jimin, but after reading The Soulmate Equation before this and seeing BTS in their acknowledgements, it’s easy to see how I felt this way. The romance was well done, and steamy scenes were more frequent in this than I’ve read in other Christina Lauren novels so far. It fit the storyline, however, and even if I’m not about drunken intercourse, I think it was handled well within the story. I did feel they both were in love with each other and that their progression towards admitting that, albeit frustrating at times, was also done well. What let the romance down was the sudden plot twist at the end. Using the pregnancy trope is one that always divides readers, and whilst I have nothing against the trope itself, I just found it so out of place in this novel, especially with the implications it gestured to. It annoyed me that drama was built with using this trope just to skip to an epilogue full of HEA and left not only the start of their relationship after the ILY’s unanswered but also triggered me over the idea that something could have been wrong, only to skip years and find it wasn’t. That really bothered me to the point that even if I have a handful of really good points of enjoying this world, it had several glaring issues that I couldn’t personally get past. Still an enjoyable enough read, but just didn’t hold the usual spark of a Christina Lauren novel for me.