Title: After I Do

Author: Taylor Jenkins Reid

Publisher: Washington Square Press 2014

Genre: Fiction

Pages: 353

Rating: 3/5 stars

Reading Challenges: Ebook

When Lauren and Ryan’s marriage reaches the breaking point, they come up with an unconventional plan. They decide to take a year off in the hopes of finding a way to fall in love again. One year apart, and only one rule: they cannot contact each other. Aside from that, anything goes.

Lauren embarks on a journey of self-discovery, quickly finding that her friends and family have their own ideas about the meaning of marriage. These influences, as well as her own healing process and the challenges of living apart from Ryan, begin to change Lauren’s ideas about monogamy and marriage. She starts to question: When you can have romance without loyalty and commitment without marriage, when love and lust are no longer tied together, what do you value? What are you willing to fight for?

This is a love story about what happens when the love fades. It’s about staying in love, seizing love, forsaking love, and committing to love with everything you’ve got. And above all, After I Do is the story of a couple caught up in an old game—and searching for a new road to happily ever after.

I loved Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and Daisy Jones and the Six so I thought I would read some of her backlist titles. Unfortunately this one just fell really flat for me. I wasn’t invested in the main relationship at any point in the novel. Lauren and Ryan just didn’t seem like a relationship that I wanted to root for. Plus we only really get Lauren’s perspective which irked me. I wanted to see both sides of the story before attempting some type of resolution. The ending was basically a non-ending to me. Nothing was actually resolved and I was annoyed…

Next up on the TBR pile: