384 pages
Published July 2024 by Holt, Henry and Company, Inc.
Publisher's Summary:
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 dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.
In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.
My Thoughts:
When the publisher says that Phoebe is at rock bottom, what they mean to say is that Phoebe has abruptly left her home and her job to travel to the Cornwall Inn to commit suicide. When she arrives, she discovers that the rest of the hotel has been taken over by a wedding party...and a bride who discovers Phoebe's plan and insists that Phoebe cannot do what she's come to do. Not because Lila is empathetic and longs to save a life. Nope, it's because Lila absolutely cannot abide the idea of having her wedding week ruined by such a thing.
That's a hell of a way to start a book and I couldn't imagine where things were going to go from there. And I would really, really love to tell you what happens next. I raced through the book as Espach introduced us to the various wedding people, including bride Lila and groom Gary and as she looked back at what had brought Phoebe to this low point in her life. As I met most of the wedding people, my first instinct was that these characters were stereotypes, but none of them ended up that way; each of them got enough background and room in the book to show us who they really are.
The Wedding People runs the gamut of emotions - from the tough beginning to humor, from sadness to frustration. It's more complex than it appears, but moves along a quick enough pace to keep things light. The ending could have been cliche. Did Espach lay out where things were going? Yes, but when it came time to conclude the book, it happened in a very realistic and more believable way. For me, this one was well worth the hype.
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