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2013 Book Review #51: The Wedding Girl
Title: The Wedding Girl
Author: Madeleine Wickham
Genre: Chick-lit
Thingummies: 3.5
Synopsis: Milly is about to marry a millionaire's heir in a lavish ceremony. There's just one problem--she's already married.
Thoughts: I pulled this off a library shelf on impulse, expecting a light, fun read. Within a chapter, I had a feeling of foreboding. The heroine was flighty, immature, and not terribly bright, her fiance was stubbornly blind, and her mother was atrocious. I hated these people. I'd accidentally gotten myself mired in a brand-name dropping morass of people being shallow.
Fortunately, I was wrong.
Oh, the characters have flaws all right. But it turns out that the author knows what she's doing. People have unexpected depths and problems beyond being idiotic. There's also hidden reserves of compassion and love. And the ending, while it has some schmaltz, also has an unexpected poignancy. This is a more complicated book than I'd realized, and I enjoyed it all the more for that.
The one big issue is that there is one character who turns out to be malevolent for reasons not fully explained. There are little hints, but given how well some of the other backstory is described, I kind of wonder if the author had intended there to be another big reveal of the character's past that gotten forgotten or accidentally edited out. As it is, the character in question does some horrible things that are never particularly justified.
That said, this is a more intelligent book than it needed to be, while still being rather compulsively readable.
Author: Madeleine Wickham
Genre: Chick-lit
Thingummies: 3.5
Synopsis: Milly is about to marry a millionaire's heir in a lavish ceremony. There's just one problem--she's already married.
Thoughts: I pulled this off a library shelf on impulse, expecting a light, fun read. Within a chapter, I had a feeling of foreboding. The heroine was flighty, immature, and not terribly bright, her fiance was stubbornly blind, and her mother was atrocious. I hated these people. I'd accidentally gotten myself mired in a brand-name dropping morass of people being shallow.
Fortunately, I was wrong.
Oh, the characters have flaws all right. But it turns out that the author knows what she's doing. People have unexpected depths and problems beyond being idiotic. There's also hidden reserves of compassion and love. And the ending, while it has some schmaltz, also has an unexpected poignancy. This is a more complicated book than I'd realized, and I enjoyed it all the more for that.
The one big issue is that there is one character who turns out to be malevolent for reasons not fully explained. There are little hints, but given how well some of the other backstory is described, I kind of wonder if the author had intended there to be another big reveal of the character's past that gotten forgotten or accidentally edited out. As it is, the character in question does some horrible things that are never particularly justified.
That said, this is a more intelligent book than it needed to be, while still being rather compulsively readable.