Alison Espach\u2019s latest novel, “The Wedding People,” unfolds during the week-long wedding celebration for Lila, a young heiress, and Gary, a widowed doctor who treated Lila\u2019s father for cancer before his death.<\/p>\n
Lila has planned an absolutely extravagant wedding to honor her father\u2019s last wish for her to be married. She is determined that nothing can go wrong (but we all know something always goes wrong at a wedding). Weddings are naturally filled with drama. The rich-people-have-a-wedding plot is not a new device, but “The Wedding People” offers something different.<\/p>\n
First of all, our narrator, Phoebe, isn\u2019t actually part of the wedding at all.<\/p>\n
Phoebe\u2019s life is in shambles. She is an academic whose research, ironically, focuses on British marriage plot novels, but she can\u2019t manage to finish the book she\u2019s been working on for years, and has thus been passed over for a tenure-track position at the university where she teaches. At the same time, her husband has received his department\u2019s highest honor, and he has left her for another woman.<\/p>\n
On top of it all, Phoebe’s beloved cat has just died. Phoebe decides she is done with this life; she\u2019s going to check into a fancy hotel that she\u2019s always dreamed of visiting in glitzy, old-money Newport, Rhode Island, have a spa day, order room service, finish things off with the entire bottle of her dead cat\u2019s painkillers and never wake up again.<\/p>\n
Headlines, puzzles and death notices from the Valley delivered to your inbox 7 a.m. daily.<\/p>\n
As Phoebe arrives at the hotel, she notices that everyone in the lobby seems to know each other\u00a0\u2014 and there are way too many Uncle Jims milling around. She realizes that they\u2019re all here for a wedding, and she has booked the lone vacant room in the hotel. Phoebe ends up stuck in the elevator with the bride, Lila, who is trying to determine why this stranger is at her wedding.<\/p>\n
In this rare moment when Lila can let her guard down with someone who doesn\u2019t know her, they share a surprisingly frank and vulnerable conversation. Phoebe matter-of-factly states that she\u2019s planning to kill herself and Lila vehemently protests: \u201cNo. You definitely can\u2019t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.\u201d Lila refuses to let Phoebe\u2019s planned suicide disrupt her carefully planned, extravagant event, so she draws Phoebe into the wedding festivities, eventually even making her a temporary maid of honor.<\/p>\n
The novel highlights how unplanned connections can profoundly change the course of our lives. Through her interactions with the wedding guests, specifically Lila and Gary and Gary\u2019s daughter Juice, Phoebe finds unexpected support and connection, and she gains the courage to confront her own pain and begins to take a long hard look at her life and make some different choices.<\/p>\n
While the premise might sound sad at first, this novel is so funny and so endearing. It is filled with all kinds of playful, comedic bits\u00a0\u2014 awkward encounters, fumbled events and silly unnecessary luxuries\u00a0\u2014 a nod to the classic novel-of-manners wedding plots from classic British writers like Jane Austen. These details add levity to the heaviness of Phoebe\u2019s inner monologue.<\/p>\n
“The Wedding People” balances a dark premise with absurdly funny and devastatingly tender moments, creating a unique and emotional reading experience\u00a0\u2014 humorous, poignant and always life-affirming.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Alicia McClintic is a book seller at Inklings Bookshop. She and other Inklings staffers review books in this space every week.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Alison Espach\u2019s latest novel, “The Wedding People,” unfolds during the week-long wedding celebration for Lila, a young heiress,…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":224530,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68,3800],"class_list":{"0":"post-224529","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us","13":"tag-yhr-reporters"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/115199115586701811","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224529","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=224529"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/224529\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/224530"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=224529"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=224529"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=224529"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}