In this novel a woman scraps her wedding after falling in love with the best man. JUICY! Interestingly though, this exciting premise only takes up the first maybe 20% of the book. Then we follow the main characters – the ex-groom, the wife, the best man, through what turn out to be long and interconnected lives. It’s pretty sad at the end. This is not because they lead sad lives. It’s full of all the stuff lives are full of, children, jobs, crises, etc. It’s not even sad because at the end they are old, and deal with the stuff that comes if you are lucky enough to get old, dementia, cancer, etc. It’s more just a feeling of: so that was that. All that drama, changing husbands, breaking hearts, and you all end up at the same place in the end.
I really loved some of the descriptions. We’ve got a child “seven years old and preposterously beautiful, like a child in a French movie;’ we’ve got chimpanzees “lounging around their enclosure like Romans after an orgy;” or this, on Haloween: “Occasionally someone executed a costume so perfectly that it made you wonder whether you’d undersold what life had to offer. ”
Or this, from when the bride first meets the best man, Garrett:
“He had one of those pitiable mold-length beards, less a fashion choice than a flag of surrender. . . . Charlie had said Garrett was having a bit of a hard time – what that meant exactly, Cece wasn’t sure, except that in guy-talk ‘a bit of a hard time’ generally meant something much worse. It meant depression or addiction of both.”
LOL. Well done this author. This must have taken some serious work.