Book Review: Unfortunately Yours
A marriage of convenience full of snark and repressed feelings? Sounds like a great time to me. In Tessa Bailey’s Unfortunately Yours, wine heiress Natalie Vos is stuck in a bind. In order to access her sizeable trust fund, she needs to meet one very old-fashioned condition, and that is to marry before it is released to her. Unfortunate, given that she wants to use the money to start up her own hedge fund venture in New York City.
Enter August Cates, an amateur winemaker running a winery in memory of his late friend, but with absolutely no knack whatsoever for the actual process of making drinkable wine. Determined not to give up, August needs just a little capital to keep the venture going.
Though Natalie and August have an initially antagonistic relationship, the two strike up a deal to enter into a fake marriage in order to get what they need. Surely real feelings won’t get involved, right?
The highlight of the book absolutely has to be the snark between Natalie and August. The fact that both are always so game to tease with insults that just toe the line of offensive works because it’s clear both know not to take what the other says too seriously. Words might say one thing, but by and large their actions convey something else entirely. Their chemistry is also really sweet in the fact that they don’t actually protest too much when they realize how real their feelings actually are, and therefore let themselves give in just a little bit sooner.
Where the book ultimately stumbles is in the way the two of them communicate more serious matters. I’m fine with a miscommunication trope, but it does confuse things when the two are so open about some aspects of their lives and feelings, and then shut down completely for other things because they feel they can’t open themselves up to the other. If that were true, where did the trust for the earlier openness come from? Especially when there was little done to warrant a retraction of trust.
On a separate note, while August’s personal plot felt very nicely wrapped up, there were elements of Natalie’s story that, by the end, felt unaddressed, or addressed in a way that didn’t track for who she had been up to that point. I can buy getting to that point eventually, but it felt as though it ended very suddenly. Certain points had me drawing parallels with Bailey’s It Happened One Summer, and I couldn’t help but feel that parts of Natalie’s story would have benefitted from the prolonged treatment Piper’s story got.
Unfortunately Yours is out June 6, 2023. Special thank you to Avon for an advance copy for review purposes.