The Wedding Game by Meghan Quinn

Luna Rossi is a veritable crafting genius—she can bedazzle and bead so hard her Etsy site is one of the hottest in the world. So it’s only natural that Luna would convince her brother and his husband-to-be to compete on The Wedding Game, a “do-it-yourself” TV show, for the title of Top DIY Wedding Expert.

As a jaded divorce lawyer, Alec Baxter scoffs at weddings and romance. But when his recently engaged brother begs him to participate in The Wedding Game, Alec grudgingly picks up a glue gun and prepares for some family bonding.

Both fierce competitors, Luna and Alec clash on national TV as harsh words and glitter fly with abandon. But as they bicker over color swatches and mood boards, they find themselves fighting something else: their growing mutual attraction. While Luna is torn between family loyalty and her own feelings, Alec wonders if he might have been wrong about love and marriage all along…

REVIEW: I'm a lover of good romantic comedy, DIY television, and all things wedding-related, so this book felt like the perfect Amazon First Reads find. Unfortunately, I do not love books written in the first person present tense, which made it hard for me to get into this otherwise quick and entertaining read. I just can't stomach statements like "I chuckle as I squeeze my glue gun" -- there's something about this perspective that feels irritatingly self-indulgent and fake. The novel is told from multiple characters' perspectives, so we get multiple first person present accounts of the action; at some points the individual voices were clear but at others it was hard to tell who was speaking and I found myself backtracking to the beginning of the chapter to remind myself whose perspective I was reading. There were some hilarious, laugh-out-loud moments which I really enjoyed (most related to the absolutely ridiculous nature of reality tv) but overall I found the characters a bit flat and the story a bit predictable. Still, it had some great scenes and a lot of fun wedding crafting ideas, so I'll give it 3 stars.