Book Review: The Wedding People by Alison Espach

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: The Wedding People
Author: Alison Espach
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
Publication date: July 30, 2024
Length: 384 pages
Genre: Contemporary fiction
Source: Library
Rating:

A propulsive and uncommonly wise novel about one unexpected wedding guest and the surprising people who help us start anew.

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamt of coming for years―she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe―which makes it that much more surprising when the women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns uproariously, absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is a look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined―and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

When Phoebe arrives at the Cornwall Inn, she’s literally at the end of the line. She’d dreamed of coming to this elegant Newport inn with her husband, except now he’s her ex, her dreams of starting a family ended with unsuccessful IVF rounds and a terrible miscarriage, and her work life — she’s an adjunct professor of literature who can’t seem to finish the books she’s been writing for far too many years — is stagnant and unfulfilling. After the devastation of her husband’s betrayal, the only bright spot remaining to Phoebe was her beloved cat — but finding him dead one day removed the last ray of light in her life. And so, Phoebe has come to this fancy inn for a final night of luxury before taking pills and slipping away.

Except life seems to have other plans for her. Upon arrival, Phoebe finds the Cornwall stuffed full of “wedding people” — she’s the only guest in the entire place not connected with the over-the-top, super-expensive, weeklong wedding extravaganza.

They laugh and then trade war stories of their terrible flights here and Phoebe does her best to ignore them, to keep her eyes focused on the magnificence of the lobby. But it’s hard. Wedding people are much louder than regular people

Mistaken for a wedding guest by the bride, Lila, Phoebe ends up on the receiving end of Lila’s gifts and confidences.

The bride steps out of the elevator and into the lobby wearing a glittering sash that says BRIDE so there is no confusion. Not that there could be any confusion. She is clearly the bride; she walks like the bride and smiles like the bride and twirls bride-ishly when she approaches High Bun and Neck Pillow in line, because the bride gets to do things like this for two or three days. She is a momentary celebrity, the reason everybody has paid thousands of dollars to come here.

Lila is self-centered and outspoken, and when she learns the truth about Phoebe’s reason for coming to the Cornwall, she’s aghast — a suicide will ruin her wedding!

Phoebe realizes that she does not truly want to end her life, and instead begins to reengage. Finding herself pulled into the wedding people’s stories and intrigues, she becomes an active part of the events, the planning, and the secrets and woes of the various people involved. Through Phoebe, we also learn much more about Lila and her family, as well as about the groom, Gary, whose story is sad and sympathetic, and his preteen daughter, who is not at all a fan of his young bride.

I initially found The Wedding People slow and not entirely interesting, but once Phoebe starts interacting with Lila and the “wedding people”, it becomes much more compelling. This is not an action-driven story by any means — instead, through the events of each day leading up to the wedding itself, we get to know the various characters, their feelings and movitations, and get a deeper understanding of how loneliness, loss, and family complications can lead people down paths they didn’t expect to follow.

Naturally, The Wedding People is also a send-up of wedding culture and the wedding industry, where the bride is always right, the wedding must be spectacular, and every detail — from napkins to chairs to the shoes of the wedding party — much be exactly right. The bachelorette party activities are so ridiculous that they’re both funny and pathetic, and each attempt of the bride’s to create a uniquely fabulous pre-wedding event is a testament to how out-of-control the focus on having a perfect wedding has become.

She can’t destroy a wedding. This wedding is too big to fail. This wedding is like the revolution of the earth. It’s going to happen whether Phoebe says anything or not.

The Wedding People is also unexpectedly touching. I found myself moved by Phoebe’s story, the emotional suffering she’s been through with the collapse of her marriage and the end of her dreams of starting a family with her husband. Because we understand so deeply what brought her to the low point where we first meet her, it’s quite lovely to see her find a new sense of self and purpose as the week goes on.

She wonders if her feelings for [spoiler] could be a new form of love, one she’s never known before: love without expectation. Love that you are just happy enough to feel. Love that you don’t try to own like a painting. But she doesn’t know if that is a real thing. She hopes it is.

Needless to say, the overarching concept of the book is funny in itself: Can you imagine being stuck at a fancy inn overrun by wedding people? It really does sound dreadful.

The Wedding People has many lighter, humorous moments, but overall, it’s an affecting story of loss, connection, endings, and beginnings. Highly engaging and readable — highly recommended.

4Dec2022

Book Review: Husband Material (London Calling, #2) by Alexis Hall

Posted in Book Reviews by Lisa @ Bookshelf Fantasies

Title: Husband Material
Series: London Calling, #2
Author: Alexis Hall
Publisher: Sourcebooks Casablanca
Publication date: August 2, 2022
Length: 432 pages
Genre: Contemporary romance
Source: Purchased
Rating:

In BOYFRIEND MATERIAL, Luc and Oliver met, pretended to fall in love, fell in love for real, dealt with heartbreak and disappointment and family and friends…and somehow figured out a way to make it work. Now it seems like everyone around them is getting married, and Luc’s feeling the social pressure to propose. But it’ll take more than four weddings, a funeral, and a bowl full of special curry to get these two from I don’t know what I’m doing to I do.

Good thing Oliver is such perfect HUSBAND MATERIAL.

This Summer 2022, you’re invited to the event(s) of the season.

After giggling my way through Boyfriend Material earlier this year, I just knew I needed the sequel in my life. And for the most part, Husband Material does not disappoint… except for the ending. But more on that later.

Blatantly modeled on Four Weddings and A Funeral**, the plot of Husband Material follows Luc and Oliver, the extreme-opposites-extremely-attract couple from the first book as they navigate being in a healthy long-term relationship (a first for both of them) while seeing all of their friends embracing wedding planning and baby making.

Two years into their relationship, Luc and Oliver still have separate flats but are together constantly. They’ve each made progress with their own personal hang-ups and issues, love each other very much, and are still funny as hell. As they attend wedding after wedding, some of their differences seem more concerning — especially when it comes to gay identity vs mainstream norms, and whether finally being able to officially and legally go the traditional marriage route means that they should.

And that’s not even addressing the rainbow elephant in the room — Luc embraces the glitter and rainbows of his ideal of gay community, but Oliver finds it all too commercialized and judgmental. If he doesn’t want a rainbow balloon arch at his wedding, does that make him a bad gay? But if he denies Luc the balloon arch, is he forcing Luc to give up part of his own identity? (Seriously, they spend A LOT of time on the balloon arch debate…)

After an unplanned panic-driven proposal (from Luc, of course), the couple decide to get married, but their cute differences as a couple seem to morph into fundamental problems as they try to navigate actually planning a wedding.

I love Luc and Oliver as characters and was very happy to reconnect with them and see how their lives have progressed since the first book. Husband Material, as a second book, assumes that we know these people, so there’s less time spent on character development and much more on plot shenanigans, which is fine, but creates a shallower reading experience. We still get a taste for the two as individuals, but their escapades (and the ridiculous goings-on surrounding the various weddings) take center stage for perhaps too much of the book — so when we do get deeper character moments, the tonal shift can be a bit jarring..

As in Boyfriend Material, the writing is heavy on word-play and humor, and most of the time, that’s truly a reading treat — don’t we all need more silly and clever and laugh-out-loud funny moments in our serious lives?

A few little samples:

“As your token gay friend, it is my duty to say that you are a fierce, sickening, incredible woman and that when you find a man who deserves you, he’ll make you feel like a princess every day of your life in a way that somehow manages to avoid reinforcing problematic gender stereotypes.”

… I couldn’t tell if we’d had a fight of not, and if we had, whose fault it had been. I mean, I had kind of dropped him on extra-special date night. Like a dick. Except I’d only done that because I needed to take care of my friend. Like definitely not a dick. Fuck. I was in a grey dick area.

I was increasingly convinced that weddings were just an elaborate cycle of vengeance that had got really out of hand. Some pair of selfish bastards had forced their friends to come to a tedious party two thousand years ago and their selfish bastard friends had decided to pay them back by forcing them to come to a tedious party, and then some wholly independent group of selfish bastards had built an industry around it and here we were. An eye for an eye leaves the world overpaying for table settings.

I made the air-quotiest air quotes that ever air-quoted.

All fun aside for a moment, I will say that I did not care for the ending, not even a little bit. And without getting into spoiler territory, I suppose it was meant to show that Luc and Oliver works best when they forge their own path and do what’s really right for the two of them — but all I could think was that they could have avoided all the angst and mess if they’d only had a real conversation months earlier. So while I think the author meant for the ending to come across as nonconventially romantic, I was just unsatisfied and a little saddened by it all.

I had thought this was the final book of a two-book story, but it looks like more is on the way. According to Goodreads, there are two more related books yet to come, although I believe the focus will shift away from Luc and Oliver to others in their friend circle.

Despite my feelings about the ending of Husband Material, I enjoyed the writing and characters enough to want more, so I’m sure I’ll check out whatever comes next.

Spoiler ahead — look away now if you don’t want to know!

**Spoilery bit: I’d completely forgotten that the main couple in Four Weddings and a Funeral decide to have a life together without getting married at the end. I guess if I’d remembered that, then I wouldn’t have been so surprised / let down by the ending of Husband Material!