~ Audiobook Review: My Favorite Half-Night Stand ~

Author: Christina Lauren

Narrators: Shayna Thibodeaux & Deacon Lee

Audiobook Length: 7 hours 8 minutes

Millie Morris has always been one of the guys. A UC Santa Barbara professor, she’s a female-serial-killer expert who’s quick with a deflection joke and terrible at getting personal. And she, just like her four best guy friends and fellow professors, is perma-single.

So when a routine university function turns into a black tie gala, Mille and her circle make a pact that they’ll join an online dating service to find plus-ones for the event. There’s only one hitch: after making the pact, Millie and one of the guys, Reid Campbell, secretly spend the sexiest half-night of their lives together, but mutually decide the friendship would be better off strictly platonic.

But online dating isn’t for the faint of heart. While the guys are inundated with quality matches and potential dates, Millie’s first profile attempt garners nothing but dick pics and creepers. Enter “Catherine”—Millie’s fictional profile persona, in whose make-believe shoes she can be more vulnerable than she’s ever been in person. Soon “Catherine” and Reid strike up a digital pen-pal-ship…but Millie can’t resist temptation in real life, either. Soon, Millie will have to face her worst fear—intimacy—or risk losing her best friend, forever.

Find It On: Goodreads / Amazon

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My Favorite Half-Night Stand is my seventh Christina Lauren read. I have a love-dislike (not quite hate) relationship with their novels as I love some of them and others do not quite work for me. This story follows UC Santa Barbara professor of criminology, 29-year-old Millie Morris. She is emotionally unavailable and generally tries to keep her relationship with others at arm’s length. She fits right in with her friends, Reid, Ed, Chris, and Alex. One night Millie has a one-night stand with Reid, but the two decide to just remain friends. A commencement ball prompts the group to each create a dating profile to find a match. When the group questions Millie’s standoffish profile, she decides to create a secret second profile under her middle name. She ends up matching with Reid and the two hit it off, although she does not know what will happen once Reid finds out the truth.

The entire concept where Millie is catfishing her friend is not going to be for every reader. As expected, the situation becomes more convoluted the longer it goes on, but I wish that Millie started slowly integrating this persona with her friend group as a whole. While Reid is her love interest, she is still hiding her true self from the entire group, so I wish that they were given these little bits of truths organically along with Reid slowly learning the truth. The whole catfishing process to bring the characters together is not going to be for every type of reader. While I did not find it bad as some other readers, it did bring to mind a lot of questions. If Reid already liked romantically in some way, then what did he like about her as he loved “Catherine’s” personality, when that is Millie. The whole thing boggled my mind as you just had to trust that somehow Reid was in the dark somehow.

This novel and Josh & Hazel came out near each other and since I was on the fence about that one, too, I can feel if more time was given to just one rather than publishing both so close together. Each just felt unfinished as they were simple concepts that stayed very simple. It seems there are two types of novels these authors write where some are extremely simple and others that attempt to be more complex. I seem to favor the latter and am constantly on the fence with the former, so I feel like there should be a way to divide them in a synopsis just to save me time. For me, this novel was a little half-baked and needed some more thought put into it to make it stand out among the vast romance crowd and even again their other works. This novel may not stop me from reading their novels, but I am slowly starting to rush to try to read all of them.