My Best Friend’s Honeymoon

This week saw the release of Meryl Wilsner‘s fourth novel, My Best Friend’s Honeymoon. When Elsie ends her engagement to Derrick, he encourages her to go on the the non-refundable honeymoon to Santa Lupita that he’d booked. Elsie takes her best friend, Ginny, who makes her promise to speak up for what she wants the whole trip. This leads to the two of them hooking up… and considering finally dating after all these years as just friends.

Why I Chose This Book:

I enjoyed Meryl Wilsner’s first book, Something to Talk About, and have been wanting to read more from them. My Best Friend’s Wedding looked like it would be cute, and I also liked that this one features a nonbinary person as one of the two main characters.

The way everything plays out was not quite what I expected, though…

What I Liked:

• Nonbinary representation. Ginny mainly uses they/them pronouns and I really liked their character overall. I enjoyed seeing how they navigate situations when gender assumptions are made vs. how Elsie reacts. Elsie always stands up for her best friend!
• Pansexual representation. Elsie often jokes about being the silent ‘P’ in ‘LGBTQ.’ Though she’s only had relationships with men, largely due to some homophobic bullying she experienced in school, she’s long had a crush on Ginny.
• Flashbacks to earlier times in their relationship. Every so often, we get looks at events in Ginny and Elsie’s adolescence that shaped them and prevented them from pursuing a romantic relationship earlier. They were randomly placed and infrequent, but helped build up a bit more of their relationship.
• Learning to speak up for yourself. Elsie needs to learn how to have an opinion and actually state it. Her character was hard to like sometimes, but I did appreciate the lessons in learning to have a voice and use it. Ginny, too, learns a thing or two about following their own dreams. Good on them!

What Didn’t Work for Me:

• Too much sex. I’m used to reading spicy romances, but here it actually started to feel gratuitous. Multiple consecutive chapters were basically just them having sex. For me, this was unfortunately to the detriment of building up the emotional connection between the characters. They’ve been in love with each other for years, but the readers don’t get to see that bond so much. It felt like the sex *was* the connection, but I need more for the relationship to feel believable.
• The breakup seemed like an extreme overreaction? Other characters call Elsie out for it, but still. It seemed forced.
• Not enough Santa Lupita. When I see a Caribbean honeymoon, I want to get to know the island! I want to see them doing fun activities there! Who ignores an entire tropical location to just have sex? Not me!
• Poor Derrick! I hope he finds his happily every after someday. He’s nice and wants to be better, and I support him in that.

Audiobook:

Blair Baker and Emily Shaw narrate as Ginny and Elsie. Both do a wonderful job in their own right… but to be honest, their voices sound similar enough that I had a hard time telling who was who. I wish the voice actors chosen would have had more distinct timbres or speaking styles.

Final Thoughts

While there was a lot I liked about My Best Friend’s Honeymoon, I felt like it needed a lot of work to make it fully enjoyable. The overdone spice and forced third-act breakup just didn’t work for me. It was cute but not my favorite. Still, I would like to try out more of Meryl Wilsner’s books in the future.

Special thanks to St. Martin’s Press, Macmillan Audio, and NetGalley for providing me with an ARC of this book!

Get the Book

You can buy My Best Friend’s Honeymoon here – it’s available as a paperback, ebook, and audiobook.

My Best Friend’s Honeymoon by Meryl Wilsner
Audiobook Narrator	Blair Baker and Emily Shaw
Audience	Adult
Genre	Contemporary Romance
Setting	Caribbean; Minnesota
Number of Pages	304
Format I Read	Audiobook & Ebook (NetGalley ARCs)
Original Publication Date	April 29, 2025
Publisher	St. Martin’s Griffin

Official Summary

Meryl Wilsner’s spicy romance, their first with a nonbinary lead, where two lifelong best friends go on a nonrefundable honeymoon together and discover sometimes to find a happily ever after, you just have to ask.

Elsie Hoffman has been engaged to her college boyfriend for a year and a half. Ginny Holtz has been in love with Elsie for almost a decade and a half.

When Elsie discovers her fiancé already planned their wedding and honeymoon as a surprise and she’s expected to be in a white dress in seven days, she swiftly realizes she’s let herself become too comfortable with a future she never wanted. She breaks things off, and a week later is on a plane to the Caribbean for her non-refundable honeymoon with her best friend Ginny instead.

Ginny thinks it’s high time Elsie learned how to speak up for herself. So, they make a deal with her. For the next week, Elsie can have whatever she wants, wherever, however, and whenever she wants it, as long as she asks. They never expected Elsie to want them.

What starts as choosing activities and taking selfies soon turns to toe-curling kisses and much, much more. But what happens when the honeymoon is over?

Meryl Wilsner’s My Best Friend’s Honeymoon is about not only learning to ask for what you want, but for the happiness you deserve.