First Lines: I wasn’t sure how it had happened. But Jesse Foster was kissing me.
I’m always up for reading a Morgan Matson book. She’s basically Sarah Dessen when it comes to contemporary romances that deal with deeper issues. I was hoping this would kill some of the tension/creepiness I was feeling from The Vanishing Stair so I could go to bed at night without thinking someone was in my house. But we’ll get into that more soon.
Charlie’s older sister is getting married and Charlie can’t wait. A wedding means all of her siblings home and under the same roof again for the first time in years. A wedding means laughter and fun with her siblings. A wedding means a last weekend to enjoy the old life before the family house gets sold and everything changes. The only problem? The weekend is turning into a disaster. Everything that could go wrong has. There are relatives who can’t be in the same room, a paper girl with a grudge, a missing tuxedo, a troublesome dog, an alarm that won’t stop going off, her brother’s unexpected girlfriend, and an AWOL wedding planner, to name a few. Can Charlie survive the chaos with her sanity in tact?
This is really a cute story about family and change. Charlie’s excited that her entire family (including her 4 older siblings) are coming home for her sister Linnie’s wedding. She loves her family so much and, with siblings all over the country, she rarely gets to see them all at the same time, let alone in the house they all grew up in. I really loved that these siblings, even with their issues, were still such a tight-knit, awesome family. And trust me, they have their issues. But every family does.
This book actually feels a lot like a romantic comedy, the way literally everything goes wrong leading up to the wedding. Every time one crisis is averted, another is quickly on its heels. It was funny, sure, but after a while you start wondering why they can’t catch a break at least once.
The one thing that I thought I would get was more of a romance story. There are hints of a love story, but not anything like what I expected. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It still turned out to be a good story (and, frankly, with the story taking place over about 3 days, I would have complained about the love moving too fast if it had developed more). I just wanted what I couldn’t have.
It was a cute read. It’s funny and heartfelt, but it really did take a while for the ball to get rolling. I was probably halfway through it before I really felt like real things were happening.
Belle of the Library 