The Wedding Date by Jasmine Guillory
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I now see why all of the reviewers and librarians are raving about The Wedding Date. It is phenomenal. I received an early eArc via Netgalley in exchange for an honest review. Interestingly enough there were some surprises for me in this book which I will not reveal as they would be spoilery. I will say that there are some things that I normally would have avoided in a book, but, I found that they work for The Wedding Date and they are part of what makes this book so good. I want to take a different approach to reviewing The Wedding Date. I have been taking Italian lessons from an Italian guy that is actually from a small village outside of Firenze (Florence, Italy) and part of how I practice Italian verbally is to describe books that I am reading. We started out today's lesson where he asked me in Italian what book I am currently reading and I respond in Italian.

I have found that a lot of what American's talk about do not translate to Italian very well. This was the same with trying to translate the title The Wedding Date as the noun "date" is not something that exists in Italian. We had a pretty interesting conversation where I tried to explain that it was not date, as in the specific day of the year, but, date as in the person the guy was taking to the wedding. I had to backpedal and actually go into more detail so we could decide which words would be the closest to translating the title to Italian. He laughed as I tried to describe how Alexa was not really his "date" but really a fake date and how Alexa and Drew met. The topic may have been done before, but, this author's take on the topic was original, fun and well done. He was intrigued by what I was trying to describe and we found that there literally were no words that translated to Italian but the closest was Il Giorno del Matrimonio which actually is The Wedding Day and anyone who has read this book knows it is so much more. It tells how a "non-date" becomes so much more and all of the things that go into making a relationship work, especially a long distance relationship with two successful, busy professionals. I hope that one day The Wedding Date is translated into Italian so that I can use it for practice with my instructor and see how the story translates so many concepts that seem American but really happen everywhere but maybe we all just have different words to describe it.