Reviews

"Every wedding, even a successful wedding, is a waste."

There are some books that you just forget, even if they were "good", and some like The Wedding People, where you simply wished never ended.

Phoebe decides to book the most expensive room at a Victorian Hotel in Rhode Island for the night, not to vacay, but to commit suicide. After a failed marriage, she decides she wants to end her life by taking all of her cat's medicine, that smells like tuna. She has a chance encounter with Lily in the elevator, who has booked a wedding WEEK, and they quickly become friends, much to Phoebe's dismay. Soon, they become the "best" of friends, all to heartwarming and hilarious results.

Despite the topics of suicide, failed marriages, IVF, and death, The Wedding People is still a humerus read and excelled in so many ways. Often hilarious, but still touching, the characters just bounced off the page. The characters were completely relatable, never were annoying, and even though there are a handful of characters, you were never lost or confused by back storylines.

The impatient bride - Lily while completely self absorbed with her overpriced affair, was hilarious. A daughter of a former waste management company owner, who was given an inheritance - to spend on a wedding, and this wedding did not hold back. I loved the Rhode Island setting.
"But how many times do I have to explain that I'm godless? That I can't get married at a church, because what church?"

Insert Gary, Lily's soon to be husband, who is introducded in the most surprising of ways. Wedding People is all one big surprise. While you think you know what is going to happen, it never does, and the banter between this virtual stranger Phoebe and the wedding people was never completely unrealistic.

The blended families were fun, witty, and hard to dislike. Gary's daughter named "Juice", while is only 11, is smart beyond her years. The staff at the hotel reminded me of some of the employees on White Lotus.

Phoebe, was one of the smartest characters I've encountered in awhile. Espach wrote her knowing we had to take her wisdom seriously. She's a professor specializing in 19th century literature and she definitely proved her worth.
"You have to pluralize the head noun, not the modifier."
"Blond and dazzling in the way that suggests she's never bough a loaf of bread at the store. And Gary, so handsome and sturdy, a man who is always bringing bread home from the store."
"I mean, I never think of historical figures as hot. They're just these bodiless, dusty, sepia-toned entities."
"She devoted her career to these books because she needed them. She didn't care that most of the other graduate students thought this was boring. These stories were like little bibles to her, teaching how to be normal, how to dream, how to believe that happiness and a new family would arrive in a single moment, on a single page, like the sudden crescendo of a symphony."

By the end of the book, I did not expect it to turn full circle the way it did. There is plenty of humor to be had, a few tears to be shed, and you will root for everyone in this book.

"A story can be beautiful, not because of the eay it ends. But because of the way it's written." This sums up the Espach's book when she wrote The Wedding People. Can't wait for her next one, and the inevitable movie just picked up with Nicole Holofcener adapting.