Paradise Problem — Books, Beauty, & Buys

By: Christina Lauren
Published Year: 2024
Publisher: Gallery Books
Pages: 352

Summary (Provided by Goodreads): Christina Lauren, returns with a delicious new romance between the buttoned-up heir of a grocery chain and his free-spirited artist ex as they fake their relationship in order to receive a massive inheritance.

Anna Green thought she was marrying Liam “West” Weston for access to subsidized family housing while at UCLA. She also thought she’d signed divorce papers when the graduation caps were tossed, and they both went on their merry ways.

Three years later, Anna is a starving artist living paycheck to paycheck while West is a Stanford professor. He may be one of four heirs to the Weston Foods conglomerate, but he has little interest in working for the heartless corporation his family built from the ground up. He is interested, however, in his one-hundred-million-dollar inheritance. There’s just one catch.

Due to an antiquated clause in his grandfather’s will, Liam won’t see a penny until he’s been happily married for five years. Just when Liam thinks he’s in the home stretch, pressure mounts from his family to see this mysterious spouse, and he has no choice but to turn to the one person he’s afraid to introduce to his one-percenter parents—his unpolished, not-so-ex-wife.

But in the presence of his family, Liam’s fears quickly shift from whether the feisty, foul-mouthed, paint-splattered Anna can play the part to whether the toxic world of wealth will corrupt someone as pure of heart as his surprisingly grounded and loyal wife. Liam will have to ask himself if the price tag on his flimsy cover story is worth losing true love that sprouted from a lie.

First Impressions

You know I love a good Christina Lauren book. I do love the cover, the summary is maybe not my favorite. I don’t dislike fake dating but it’s not a trope that is a favorite of mine. Plus I don’t like rich people problems. But I trusted Christina Lauren and knew I’d love it anyway.

What I thought

This book was very fun. It helped to get me out of my reading rut.

Liam and Anna got married when Liam was in grad school and Anna was in college in order to qualify for adorable housing. Anna was friends with Liam’s younger brother but didn’t know him at all. For 2 years they lived together and completely ignored each other. Now, 3 years late, Liam’s sister is getting married and his family wants his wife there. Anna thought they got divorced, but when Liam found out that in order to get his 100 million dollar inheritance he needed to be married for 5 years, he never signed the paperwork.

Liam and Anna had some good chemistry, even it was a bit instant for my tastes. Their physical attraction to each other made it a little hard to believe that they completely ignored each other the two years they lived together, but it did help make the romance move quickly over one week on a private island. I did appreciate that Anna wasn’t made to be “unlike other girls”. Since she doesn’t come from a rich background, it could’ve been easy for Liam to state multiple times how different she was from the rich girls he had dated, but it never went that route which was really nice.

Liam’s family is the worst. The only one who is redeemable is his teenage niece. I did enjoy the bit of mystery regarding why Liam had not talked to his family for 5 years. It ended up being a little bit worse than I expected but that also helped to justify the length of time he cut himself off from his family. I do wish that we could’ve gotten a little more of a friendship interaction with Anna and Jake considering they had been friends in college, but he’s basically nonexistent in the book.