On the HahaFiction shelf
You Deserve Each Other
by Sarah Hogle
Naomi Westfield and Nicholas Rose are engaged, miserable and stuck with an expensive incentive to stay together. Whoever ends the engagement pays the wedding cancellation costs. Each tries to annoy the other into quitting, turning their home into the setting for a prank war that may reveal what they still want from each other.
From the publisher’s blurb
“whoever ends the engagement will have to foot the nonrefundable wedding bill”Read the full description at G.P. Putnam’s Sons
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What makes it funny?
Naomi's insistence that she can maintain her own car has become an elaborate secret. In the opening chapter, she admits that she pays a mechanic in cash and lets Nicholas believe she did the work. When a tire goes flat, protecting that reputation leaves her walking to work and begging a ride home.
The comedy at work
Her narration gives away the foolishness she's trying to conceal from everyone else. Proud declarations require increasingly awkward evasions, and the wedding bill makes ending an unhappy relationship into a contest neither partner intends to lose.
Try this if…
A couple who already know how to hurt each other's feelings drive this romance. Readers who enjoy an antagonistic relationship being reconsidered, with an opinionated narrator exposing her own bad decisions, are the clearest fit.
Good to know
Naomi is the sole narrator. Kirkus found her cruelty difficult to get past and felt the romance arrived late. The review also noted references to anxiety and depersonalization, while criticizing how briefly those subjects were explored.
More funny contemporary romance
Sources & further reading
- Publisher and opening excerpt
Publisher
- Kirkus review
Review
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