The Wedding Crasher

Some fake-dating books begin with a contract; The Wedding Crasher begins with a woman pulling a fire alarm on someone else's vows, and the desk has admired the opening ever since. Mia Sosa's romcom runs the trope at screwball velocity with two Washington lawyers-adjacent professionals who meet in the exact worst way and then, by the genre's iron law, need each other within the month. It is also the rare fake-relationship book that is honest about why people perform couplehood: not for love of theatre, but because institutions demand a shape and punish its absence.

Solange Pereira is helping her wedding-planner cousin when she stumbles onto evidence, minutes before the ceremony, that the marriage about to occur should not — and does the catastrophic, correct, and irreversible thing. The groom she extracts is Dean Chapman, corporate attorney, a man whose life plan had the wedding as a load-bearing entry, and whose gratitude is complicated by the fact that his firm's biggest client and his partnership track both prefer their lawyers safely coupled. When the two collide again, the bargain writes itself. Solange, between jobs and allergic to Dean's whole category of man, will play the devoted girlfriend through the client courtship season; Dean will owe her, formally. The book then does what Sosa does best, which is run genuine cultural texture through the comedy — Solange's Brazilian-American family is a full ensemble with opinions and pastries, and the couple's fault line, his spreadsheet certainty versus her refusal to shrink for any institution, is argued rather than decorated.

What the desk admires most is the heat-to-banter ratio, calibrated high on both axes, and the book's insistence that chemistry is an argument two people keep losing together. The performance-becomes-real turn arrives on schedule but lands with specificity: these two rehearse being a couple and accidentally teach each other what they actually require, which neither's previous life plan had line items for.

Honest notices: the setup asks for one large coincidence and the third act runs the standard rupture; the pace covers both. Content notes are light. Heat is explicit, frequent, and cheerfully argued about.

Who is this for? Fake-dating readers who like their meet-disasters archival, fans of banter with citations, and anyone who has ever stopped a wedding in their head. Sosa's adjacent books share the universe, cousins and colleagues each collecting their own volumes, and the desk recommends the full guest list. RSVP yes, bring an appetite for the family table, and do not sit near the fire alarm unless you mean it.