My Favorite Half-Night Stand by Christina Lauren

My Favorite Half-Night Stand by Christina Lauren

My Rating: ★★★★

Millie Morris is best buds with a group of guys who also happen to be her colleagues. As a professor and expert on female serial killers, she’s ready zone out but still support her friends in their areas of study every time they get excited about something out of her area of interest. Terrible at letting anyone in or sharing her feelings, Millie is the first to change the subject or crack a joke. Things get weird after she has a half-night stand with one of her best buds, Reid Campbell, because she realizes that she has feelings for him. Unable and unwilling to let him in, she struggles with their mutual decision to keep things platonic, especially after her group of friends decide they need to hit dating websites to find a date for a big event coming up. It all seems like a great idea until she creates a new secret profile and catfishes Reid.

Told in narrating perspectives, we follow Millie and Reid as they navigate their love lives, friendships, and personal hardships. I absolutely love this story even if I didn’t love the ending. It has such a great cast of characters that I felt myself wanting to be friends with all of them. It’s clear that Millie, Reid, Alex, Ed, and Chris have a meaningful friendship with each other. The company they keep enriches their lives. Plus, they’re a silly bunch with an addiction to boardgames.

While it’s hard to keep the names straight at first, it’s easy to know who is who after a few chapters. I found myself liking everyone but Millie after some time because of her response to catching feels for Reid. Instead of being honest after he doesn’t put two and two together about her secret profile, Catherine, being her, she decides to catfish him. It’s extremely immature of her. That said, she does experience a lot of character growth through the book and I found myself liking her more again toward the end once she faces what she’s done and decides to work on herself.

I loved Reid and I did feel bad for him because I knew he was being catfished all along. I also loved his family and the interaction his family has with his friends. It’s like they accept Reid and all his friends as an extension of their own family. It reminded me a lot of my own family, so I just really loved them. While I didn’t care for the ending, I think it did make sense because of who Reid is as a person.

I highly recommend picking up this novel. It’s funny, heartwarming, but also sad. It has a wonderful cast of characters and I laughed a lot while reading it. I especially loved the group chats between the characters and how they interacted as friends who are also family. I look forward to checking out more books from Christina Lauren in the future.