D'Vaughn and Kris Plan a Wedding: The Perfect Beach Read

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Besides not knowing each other before the show, both of them have different reasons for coming on the show. But anyway, this was a fresh and sexy romantic comedy, with almost no angst, and with a very lovable main character: D'Vaughn. They have the type of love where you don’t even hesitate to root for a very real wedding at the end of them only knowing each other for 4 weeks.

A beautiful distillation of the ways love can come if you simply open your heart, your arms, and fall, trusting the other person to hold on while they fall alongside you. If they pull off the deception and make it to the altar, they can choose to either accept prize money or get married for real. Selling their chemistry on camera is surprisingly easy, and it's still there when no one else is watching, which is an unexpected bonus.

There are a ton of secondary queer characters including a fat Black trans woman, non binary character, Black gay men, I'm pretty sure that there's also a pansexual secondary character in addition to lesbian and gay characters. D’Vaughn hopes being on the show will help her come out to her family, Kris hopes to find true love. So I've been an in general reading slump for a good part of last month from just burnout and just the book I read were just not good. This story tracks how their feelings for one another develop, despite the growing pressures of lying to their families and performing for the cameras.

Particularly loved how D'Vaughn's coming out was handled and how Kris showed up for her over and over again. They had different reasons for joining the show; D'Vaughn wants a push to come out to her religious family, and Kris is looking to make a real connection with someone outside of her substantial social media following. The whole premise of the novel is a fake engagement stunt, but frankly the fake part falls away pretty quickly.So there was little doubt that watching D’Vaughn and Kris plan a fake wedding would be absolutely delightful. I ended up enjoying both books about the same, but that was a cooking show so this being a dating/fake wedding show, the books felt so different which I appreciated. She’s sort of neglected to come out to her mom for years, so a big splashy fake wedding is just the excuse she needs. I often talk about being a character driven reader and boy does that seem to matter as I read more and more books.

This is my first time reading about a Black lesbian couple in my twenty-four years of life and ugh I needed this. I could absolutely believe that, if D’Vaughn and Kris were real women, this is how they would really interact with each other day in, day out.

In a romance featuring Black joy, plus-sized beauty, and Mexican pride, the conflicts are entirely believable, and not overly dramatic, and make for a thoroughly enjoyable read. As I said above, this book has a few sentences in Spanish and even though the narrator doesn’t sound like a native speaker she does a good job. She’s right on the cusp of really making it as an influencer, so a stint on reality TV is the perfect chance to elevate her brand. The story has great pacing, and you experience things in the moment, a bit like it would be if you were watching the show.

However, there is some grammatical gender confusion that possibly comes from the written version and I don’t think is related to a gender-neutral approach to Kris because she’s referred to as male or female on different occasions. But each week of the competition brings new challenges, and soon the prize money’s not the only thing at stake. Something else I appreciated about this story is how straightforward D’Vaughn and Kris’s relationship was. i love that the romance is black and sapphic, that kind of representation is amazing and we need to see more of it in romance novels. Kris is fiercely supportive and protective--almost pushy on that at a couple of points, for me, as when she insists on PDAs in front of D'Vaughn's family that D'Vaughn is uncomfortable with--but D'Vaughn really wants that level of someone fighting her corner.

Curvy, femme and very closeted D’Vaughn is hoping to diversify the cast of this season of the show with her presence as a queer, Black, full figured contestant.