Roomies

Score: 3.5/5

Steam Rating: 🍆🍆🍆/5

I read another 5⭐️ Christina Lauren book last month so I had high hopes for Roomies too, but it fell a bit flat for me.

It could have been how unbelievable I found the storyline: girl crushes on guitar player in the subway, then offers to marry him so he can get a work visa and perform in her uncle’s broadway show...without having ever said more than a couple of words to him.

And don’t get me started on the actual marriage / visa / green card aspect. I’ve gone through it all to get my husband a green card and it is definitely not as easy as they made it seem. Not to mention that he wouldn’t have been able to work until it was all sorted out.

But really I think I could have overlooked most of that if the audiobook narration had been better. I’m assuming K.C. Sheridan is Irish, because her narration of the Irish love interest is brilliant, but when narrating the American lead (which is the majority of the book) she sounds like an old-timey newscaster and has a strange cadence to her speech, going up in the weirdest places. Plus she slips back into an Irish accent frequently, which makes it confusing and kept pulling me out of the story.

If only she’d narrated the whole book in her native accent, I could have listened to that for ever!

Those complaints aside I did enjoy the book and liked the characters for the most part (except the main character, Holland, who I mostly found super irritating).

Have you read this one?

Synopsis:

From subway to Broadway to happily ever after. Modern love in all its thrill, hilarity, and uncertainty has never been so compulsively readable as in New York Times bestselling author Christina Lauren’s romantic novel.

Marriages of convenience are so...inconvenient.
For months Holland Bakker has invented excuses to descend into the subway station near her apartment, drawn to the captivating music performed by her street musician crush. Lacking the nerve to actually talk to the gorgeous stranger, fate steps in one night in the form of a drunken attacker. Calvin Mcloughlin rescues her, but quickly disappears when the police start asking questions.

Using the only resource she has to pay the brilliant musician back, Holland gets Calvin an audition with her uncle, Broadway’s hottest musical director. When the tryout goes better than even Holland could have imagined, Calvin is set for a great entry into Broadway—until his reason for disappearing earlier becomes clear: he’s in the country illegally, his student visa having expired years ago.

Seeing that her uncle needs Calvin as much as Calvin needs him, a wild idea takes hold of her. Impulsively, she marries the Irishman, her infatuation a secret only to him. As their relationship evolves and Calvin becomes the darling of Broadway—in the middle of the theatrics and the acting-not-acting—will Holland and Calvin to realize that they both stopped pretending a long time ago?