The Duplicate Bride by Ginny Baird

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Still feeling in a contemporary mood, I decided to go through my paperbacks and see what I haven't read before. I don't usually buy books without knowing the author or having read it in eBook first, but I saw The Duplicate Bride by Ginny Baird on Lisa's youtube channel during a book haul I believe. It has my favorite trope, wrong sibling. A few days later I saw the second book at Walmart. I decided to grab it and ordered the first online. I applied this to the prompt new to me author for Fall in Love! This also listed on the back of the book as the first in the Blue Hill Brides series, but I haven't seen any series pages outside of the author's website.

Hope is enjoying summer break and not having to work, being a school teacher, and is ready to celebrate her twin sister's wedding. Jackie, her twin, is having issues as a wedding planner with her latest wedding. She's supposed to meet her fiancé Brent to meet the rest of his family and do the final preparations for the wedding. It's a week long celebration ending in the nuptials. Jackie can't make it as early as planned and asks Hope to pretend to be her. Hope turns her down, but says she'll go early to explain the issues and be there to help out. When she arrives, the family assumes she's Jackie, including Brent. As Hope gets pulled into the festivities and her lie by omission starts snowballing, Brent and Hope start to connect.

Okay, so a couple things I want to mention. There is technically cheating in here, both emotional and a couple of kisses. Although Brent doesn't actually know he's cheating. Also, unbeknownst to me, this is also a clean romance. It makes sense for the trope, but we didn't get anything at the end either. I just want to preference that. Now, Jackie and Brent are planning a marriage of convenience. Brent is hoping that it will help secure his position in the family business and Jackie is rebounding and just wants to get it over. They've barely even kissed and aren't really open with each other much. When Brent runs into Hope as Jackie, he feels something different. He thinks it's at first the jitters from getting married.

I enjoyed this rendition of the trope. I enjoyed the connection between Hope and Brent. I also loved how obvious and visceral Ginny wrote Hope and the guilt, confusion, pining and hope that she was experiencing. She was going into this with good intentions and things just kept snowballing. I felt for her so bad and could really understand and connect with her ups and downs. What really bothered me with the story was her sister. I feel like her keeping to push her arrival back was fine, it fits the plot, but the things she said was so horrible to her sister. It just felt off. Now I know that not all sibling relationships are perfect, but I feel like "twin sense" is a thing and was a little disappointed. Also I didn't like how Jackie kept almost gas-lighting Hope. She was getting torn into so many pieces and her sister almost didn't care. Plus she ends up placing most of the blame on her at the end. Now Hope took a lot of the blame onto herself, but I wished that her sister had stepped up more. I feel like the reconciliation between Hope and Brent was fine. I wanted way more grovel from Jackie though.

I overall enjoyed this read. I'll probably pick up the second book, since I own it. Knowing that it's a clean romance, I'm not sure it'll be at the top of my list. I don't have to have steam in my books, but I do prefer it to at least have more tension. We'll see how the second book goes. Maybe she was trying not to do too much here with the taboo-ness of the trope. We'll see. I loved Brent's family and hope that there's more written for them.

Have you read The Duplicate Bride?

Bookishly Yours,

Stasi🍎

STATISTICS: The Duplicate Bride, Ginny Baird, 4-stars, 0 days, paperback, 368 pages, published in 2020