2010 romance. Laurel McBane and three of her childhood friends run a
wedding business, everything from engagement photos to the Big Day;
she does the cakes. Delaney Brown is the brother of one of the other
friends, who's known them all for years and treats them like little
sisters…
Hmm.
On the one hand it's welcome that these people mostly behave like
adults. Laurel and Del realise their attraction, decide to take it
slowly, then decide that toe-curlingly good sex is much more fun.
There are obstacles which in other romance novels would be Major
Obstructions (e.g. she sees him talking in a friendly way with an
attractive woman) – but they sort them out like grown-ups, which is
lovely. But the lack of Big Misunderstandings leaves very little
obstacle to the romance, and what's left is mostly that each of them,
while of course utterly in love, assumes that the other is just
expecting a short-term thing. Which isn't really enough to produce any
sense of tension. (Yes, of course the reader knows they'll end up
together, but there can still be tension in how they get there.)
Part of that obstacle is also American class prejudice, which always
seems to me like a poor proxy for wealth prejudice (as opposed to the
British version which is a somewhat separate thing). But that's a
personal distaste. It does seem to sit quite oddly against the last
section of the book, in which the extended-family vacation promised
last book finally takes place… and, well, it's just wealth porn.
Wealth and good taste, perhaps, no gold-plated bath taps here, but it
feels very much along the lines of "here is a thing that you, dear
reader, might do, if only you had enough money".
Also, well, what I liked most about the first book was the
practicality of the wedding business operation and crisis management;
there was less of that in book 2, and almost none here, just one fight
between mother and stepmother of a bride. Bed of Roses made up for
it a bit by showing us Emma as someone whose life really is focussed
on the flowers she's always working with; I felt that Laurel's baking
this time was just a thing she did, not the thing that she cared
enough about to build her life round.
It's not a bad book, and it doesn't even have the major stumble of
book 2, but it is very much less than it could have been.
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