A wedding readers won't be able to resist crashing.
Hilderbrand’s surprisingly original take on the wedding disaster novel.
A wedding weekend is a time-honored literary pretext for exploring family dysfunction, and Hilderbrand’s version combines gentle irony with astute observation. The Carmichael family has vacationed at their rambling summer abode on Nantucket Island for almost a century. Now, the house will be the site of high-profile divorce attorney Doug Carmichael’s youngest daughter Jenna’s nuptials. "The Notebook," left by Jenna’s mother, Beth, who died of cancer six years ago, has planned the wedding down to the last detail. The weekend, which will include a rehearsal dinner, Saturday ceremony and reception, and Sunday brunch, has drawn the Carmichaels and their entourage into the ideal arena for emotional fireworks. Doug’s 40-year-old daughter, executive recruiter Margot, hopelessly enamored with her father’s rakish older law partner, Edge (one of many nicknames right out of the preppy handbook), regrets her one ethical lapse at her lover's behest, involving a more age-appropriate romantic prospect, Griff. Doug, who married second wife Pauline too soon after Beth’s passing, now contemplates divorce. Pauline, sensing Doug’s withdrawal, hopes that her daughter Rhonda’s service as a bridesmaid will finally earn her genuine entry into the Carmichael clan. Ann, the groom’s mother, a consummate politician, has miscalculated the personal toll of asking statuesque blonde Helen, her husband’s former mistress and mother of his love child, Chance, to the wedding. Crises small and large loom: Edge, though not married, refuses to make his and Margot’s relationship public; a historic tree named Alfie must be pruned to accommodate the wedding tent; Chance suffers a severe allergic reaction to mussels; Doug’s son Nick appears to be involved with a married bridesmaid. The populous cast makes establishing a coherent throughline difficult, and the first 200 pages are mainly prologue. But Hilderbrand’s casually tossed-off zingers, and her gift for eliciting sympathy for even the most insufferable of her characters, keep the pages turning until the disaster unfolds in earnest.
A wedding readers won't be able to resist crashing.Pub Date: June 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-316-09978-3
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Reagan Arthur/Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: April 26, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2013
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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