Monday, March 28, 2022

The Un-Arranged Marriage by Laura Brown @AuthorLBrown #ContemporaryRomance #Romance #Review



The Un-Arranged Marriage by Laura Brown is live!


About the Book:

Their mothers are the worst matchmakers…

Mark Goldman has never gotten along with Shaina Fogel. Ever. Even when they were in diapers, their bestie mothers wanted them to grow up and get married. Not happening. Mark prefers his quiet, reserved life. But a family wedding is about to change everything Mark thought he knew about his archnemesis.

A week of wedding events with Mark Goldman? Shaina would rather have a week of root canals. Maybe the guy is hot, but for their entire lives, he's never once acknowledged the fact that she's hard of hearing. So it comes as a massive surprise when she discovers that Mr. High-and-Mighty and Annoyingly Sexy simply didn't know. And now she needs his help.

When it's revealed that the weeklong wedding events are actually a weeklong competition—for a dream vacation—Mark and Shaina do the unthinkable: work together. And the second the animosity begins to fade, something even more electric takes its place. Only now it's not just an attraction between enemies. And nothing could be worse than the fact that their mothers might have had it right…

My Review:

The Un-Arranged Marriage is a cute and fun contemporary romance. Shaina Fogel and Mark Goldman were a match made in heaven from the time they were infants - according to their mothers, anyway. Growing up they couldn't stand each other and never spent any time together, if they could help it anyway. When Mark's sister Leah gets married, Shaina and Mark's relationship changes. 

The week-long wedding festivities don't just include wedding prep, they include a competition. One that Shaina desperately wants to win. One that includes asking Mark for help. One that has mothers fluttering and family members talking.

Except, it's just a competition, no strings, no attraction, no nothing. Both competitive in nature, this union is just a means to a winning end.

Wrong.

Shaina is a strong, independent woman with a lifelong hearing disability. There are times she gets frustrated, not just with Mark, because no one takes her hearing into consideration or they emphasis it too much (I'm looking at you, Noah!) and treat her as an invalid. Weak and sickly she definitely is not. Mark is a sweet and caring hero in our story. He truly didn't realize Shaina was hard of hearing (I'm still not sure how you wouldn't know that, though, if you were around this person all the time.) Once he figured it out, he genuinely tried to change his speech patterns, volume, and body language.

The plot engaged me and kept me interested in Shaina and Mark as separate people and as a couple. Every family has meddlers and gossips so the secondary characters were written well and I found them believable. Once Shaina and Mark got over themselves and paid attention to each other - like, really paid attention - their dynamics and chemistry were off the charges. The book is fast-paced, entertaining, and brought attention to disabilities and sexualities. I enjoyed this enemies-to friends-to lovers contemporary romance. 

I was provided a copy of this book to read.

My Rating:



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Meet Laura Brown:


After spending her childhood coming up with new episodes to her favorite sitcoms instead of sleeping, Laura Brown decided to try her hand at writing and never looked back. A hopeless romantic, she married her high school sweetheart, though they didn’t even go to the same high school! They live in Massachusetts with two cats with cerebellar hypoplasia, and an energetic kid who keeps them on their toes. Laura’s been hard of hearing her entire life but didn’t start learning ASL until college, when her disability morphed from an inconvenience to a positive part of her identity. It’s important to her to create strong, competent characters with hearing loss, as she didn’t have that growing up. At home the closed captioning is always on, lights flash with the doorbell, and hearing aids are sometimes optional.

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