Review: After the Billionaire's Wedding Vows by Lucy Monroe
This is very much not my usual book, I picked it up because it was on the best romances of 2021 list the podcast Fated Mates made and I really liked the premise.
After the Billionaire's Wedding is a marriage in trouble book about a married couple working-class American Polly and Greek billionaire Alexandros (heads up that Greek wealth disparity or the Greek economy are not mentioned one time). Polly is six months pregnant with their second child when she tells him, at a dinner with his whole family, that his brother is a better husband to his new bride. He argues with this and she responds by checking out of the conversation and essentially saying "sure if you say so." This incited Alexandros to actually examine his relationship with his wife and how his family treats her.
I found parts of this book a touch confusing. I had to read lines repeatedly to understand what they meant once or twice and there is one point where Alexandros undresses his sleeping wife and thinks this is the first time he has even undressed her not for a sex-related reason and then pages later states how often he undresses her even when they aren't going to have sex. Just occasional weird inconsistencies like that. It certainly made me want to side-eye both the author and the editor.
I have never read a category romance before so I have no clue what the normal vibe of these books is, but if they all have a similar style I am not sure I will be reading a ton more. I wasn't always sure whose point of view I was reading from and didn't really find either character to have a strong voice. To this books credit, I absolutely flew through this book, though this is in part because I was reading it as an eBook and if I don't finish them in one go I am likely to never pick it back up but it was also partly because I genuinely wanted a resolution to the conflicts between the characters. It is a genuinely fun and fast book to read on the whole.
I don't love the evil sister of the hero trope generally, and I don't think this book did any work to make the sister feel like a real person, she's just spoiled and lazy and too attached to her phone. I thought the relationship with her evil mother-in-law was slightly better done, I was genuinely invested in seeing it resolved though that happened off-page which is something else I do not like. If you are going to have the relationship with the mother-in-law be the central external conflict then I think solving it off-page is a disservice to the reader even if the central emotional conflict is solved on-page.
I thought the way this book dealt with social issues to be very weird. They are only really mentioned to make sure we know our heroine is an actual living angle. She is involved with charities that help children and the marginalized, unlike his mother whose charitable involvement is only with organizations that have more social cache. This is mentioned multiple times and baffled me every time. First, children's charities literally are the most socially advantageous to publically participate in, so that claim is weird that it isn't normal to help these charities. Second, never once is it mentioned what any of these charities actually do, even just a mention of them being for sick kids or helping people immigrate to Europe would have been something I could work with. His wealth is occasionally almost grappled with, it just felt like she was mentioning the wealth in a socially conscious way for like five words but didn't actually want to explore this topic deeply. I would have preferred it just not be mentioned at all as a social issue if it was going to just be there to say don't worry this billionaire is sad when he has to fire people.
This book certainly has positives. It really truly is compulsively readable, which is incredible obviously. I also did like the way most of the family relationships were explored, I was so interested in how everyone was connected and where the relationships were going. And I really enjoyed that the hero was so clearly invested in identifying the places he had been a bad husband, analyzing why he behaved that way, taking steps to actually demonstrably change his behavior, and talking to his wife about all of these things.
I liked this book alright! It was a fast and fun read even if I didn't think it was fleshed out enough for my tastes. And even though I think it needed to be edited again.
Four days after I finished this book I did something I normally do not do. I revised my rating down a star. I did this because I am sure that if I hadn't read this book in one sitting I would not have picked it back up again. Also, I think my desire to like this book was still coloring my dating even when I didn't really have many positives in my reading experience.
