Something Wilder, by Christina Lauren





Something Wilder by Christina Lauren

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


“Something Wilder” wants to be a second-chance romance, a treasure-hunt caper, and a desert survival thriller. Lily Wilder stages fake treasure hunts through Utah using the hand-drawn map she has from her father. Leo, her first love, returns with friends, and Lily’s map pulls them towards a real treasure hunt. The route back to the ranch and to each other soon becomes a violent scramble involving guns, knives, death, greed, and a suspiciously reusable set of villains. Attractive premise, poor execution.

»An explosion detonated in his blood.«

That sentence appears twice, in Chapters Thirteen and Fifteen; Chapter Twenty-One repeats the same blood-and-fire image twice more. The pattern feels less like a developing motif than a shortcut: whenever desire peaks, the prose reaches for combustion instead of letting the characters carry the scene.

Romantic-adventure capers need momentum, danger, and protagonists whose choices become more intelligible under pressure. The desert setting is vivid, but each escalation piles on another gun, villain, or reversal without deepening the characters. What ought to feel like a rollicking romantic caper becomes increasingly strange and implausible.

»This feels like a second chance.«

That line captures the promise, but the romance is crowded out by treasure logistics and mechanical danger. The story periodically turns into a lurid robber’s yarn, all guns, knives, and deaths, without deciding whether its violence is funny, thrilling, or serious.

By Chapter Nineteen I had stopped seeing the group as plucky innocents. Greed and money have become the story’s organising principle: Lily wants the ranch, Leo wants Lily, and the others want treasure or status. Bradley is scarcely better than Terry, Walter is perpetually whiny, Leo is governed by lust, Lily by greed, and their attempt to conceal Terry’s death makes the ensemble more morally compromised than charming. The book recognises this, but never turns it into interesting moral complexity. The cover-up feels like a device to keep the plot moving.

Christina Lauren can make contrivance work when the emotional stakes are clearer. In the same broad romantic-comedy territory, my five-star “The Unhoneymooners” made Olive and Ethan’s banter grow into trust and respect; “The Paradise Problem” gave me a resilient, witty heroine and emotional resonance beneath its absurdity. Here, Lily and Leo’s chemistry is buried under exposition, logistics, and an irritating ensemble. It recalls the weaker pattern I found in “Josh and Hazel's Guide to Not Dating”, where quirks and set pieces substitute for depth. Even the predictable “In a Holidaze” felt more coherent about its intended comfort.

Ambition is not the problem. The ranch premise has real romantic potential, and the desert setting is vivid. But a pulse is not a plot, and a combustible metaphor is not chemistry. The story becomes so strange and unlikely that, when the same villains capture them a second time in exactly the same place, I can no longer suspend disbelief. As a romantic adventure, it is repetitive; as a romance, too much emotional work is outsourced to physical attraction; as a caper, it never earns its chaos.

Two stars out of five.


Ceterum censeo Putin esse delendam




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