My Favorite Half-Night Stand

by Christina Lauren

Overview

By the New York Times bestselling author who “hilariously depicts modern dating” (Us Weekly), My Favorite Half-Night Stand is a laugh-out-loud romp through online dating and its many, many fails.

Millie Morris has always been one of the guys. A UC Santa Barbara professor, she’s a female-serial-killer expert who’s quick with a deflection joke and terrible at getting personal. And she, just like her four best guy friends and fellow professors, is perma-single.

So when a routine university function turns into a black tie gala, Mille and her circle make a pact that they’ll join an online dating service to find plus-ones for the event. There’s only one hitch: after making the pact, Millie and one of the guys, Reid Campbell, secretly spend the sexiest half-night of their lives together, but mutually decide the friendship would be better off strictly platonic.

But online dating isn’t for the faint of heart. While the guys are inundated with quality matches and potential dates, Millie’s first profile attempt garners nothing but dick pics and creepers. Enter “Catherine”—Millie’s fictional profile persona, in whose make-believe shoes she can be more vulnerable than she’s ever been in person. Soon “Catherine” and Reid strike up a digital pen-pal-ship...but Millie can’t resist temptation in real life, either. Soon, Millie will have to face her worst fear—intimacy—or risk losing her best friend, forever.

Perfect for fans of Roxanne and She’s the Man, Christina Lauren’s latest romantic comedy is full of mistaken identities, hijinks, and a classic love story with a modern twist. Funny and fresh, you’ll want to swipe right on My Favorite Half-Night Stand.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781501197406
Publisher:	Gallery Books
Publication date:	12/04/2018
Pages:	384
Sales rank:	11,861
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of longtime writing partners and best friends Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the New York Times, USA TODAY, and #1 internationally bestselling authors of the Beautiful and Wild Seasons series, Dating You / Hating You, Autoboyography, Love and Other Words, Roomies, Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating, My Favorite Half-Night Stand, The Unhoneymooners, Twice in a Blue Moon, The Soulmate Equation, Something Wilder, and The True Love Experiment. You can find them online at ChristinaLaurenBooks.com and @ChristinaLauren on Instagram or Twitter.

Editorial Reviews

★ 10/08/2018
Lauren’s delicious newest standalone rom-com (after Josh and Hazel’s Guide to Not Dating) captures some of the perils of online dating by focusing on the alternating points of view of Millie Morris and Reid Campbell, two members of a small, insular group of friends who work at UC Santa Barbara. After the two of them enjoy the titular sexual encounter, Millie, using a half-obscured profile picture and her middle name, matches with Reid on a dating app. The two friends wind up entangled in an unexpected sexual and romantic relationship in the digital realm that threatens to destroy their offline friendship. The majority of the novel is told in prose, but text messages, group chats, and emails sent through the dating app solidify the world that Millie and her friends live in and shows the steady deepening of the romance between Reid and Millie’s alter ego. This is a messy and sexy look at digital dating that feels fresh and exciting. Agent: Holly Root, Root Literary. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

"You can never go wrong with a Christina Lauren novel... Yet again, Christina Lauren offer up a delectable, moving take on modern dating with My Favorite Half-Night Stand, reminding us all that when it comes to intoxicating, sexy, playful romance that has its finger on the pulse of contemporary love this duo always swipes right."

Entertainment Weekly

[T]he perfect book to binge-read over the holiday break. My Favorite Half-Night Stand is the writing duo’s best romantic comedy of a read yet.

HelloGiggles

2018-10-04

A criminology professor uses a fake dating profile to flirt with her best friend in Lauren's (Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating, 2018, etc.) latest.

Looking for a date to a commencement banquet at UC Santa Barbara, Millie Morris and her platonic friends Reid Campbell, Stephen "Ed" D'Onofrio, Alex Ramirez, and Christopher Hill decide to join a dating site. But when Millie and Reid have a one-night stand (parting ways early, making it a half-night stand), their feelings for each other start to interfere with their plans. Reid pursues two online matches, the first a pretty but bland woman named Daisy and the other a fascinating woman named Catherine whose face is obscured in her profile picture. Writing as Catherine, Millie opens up to Reid about all the things she's been afraid to talk to him about in person—her home life, her past, and her true feelings for him. But when they start to get closer in real life, too, she realizes that her ruse may cost her both her friendship with Reid and any prospect of a relationship. Meanwhile, Reid is torn between Millie and her digital alter ego. With her split personality—aloof and sarcastic in person, honest and vulnerable online—Millie brings great tension to the book, even if her quirky obsession with serial killers is underutilized. Text messages headed with avatars and wrapped in conversation bubbles add a fun texture to the rapid-fire dialogue. Though the commencement banquet turns out to be little more than a footnote, it's worth pulling an all-nighter to see if Reid and Millie will graduate from friends to lovers.

A funny, sexy page-turner that warns: Keep your friends close and their avatars closer.

Kirkus Reviews