I was kind of hyped for this because I enjoy reading about wedding drama. Meh. This was the blandest wedding-themed book I ever saw in my life.
The series features four lifelong friends who run a business putting on weddings. This one features Mackensie the photographer. Who is very good at her job (despite my not being able to see her photos!), and I did enjoy reading about the process of how she worked with her clients. I do enjoy reading books where someone is very good at their job. Unfortunately for this book, that was really the best part of it.
There really isn't a plot to this. Mackensie re-meets Carter, a nerdy-yet-hot young professor that she went to high school with. He had a crush on her throughout school, they sweetly and blandly get together, with very little conflict to bring out their characters. Frankly, I glazed over throughout their scenes together. They're the kind of folks you'd be happy for if they got together in real life because both of them are nice people, but would find rather dull as a pairing. Meh. I didn't care.
The plot, such as it is, is that Mac's mother Linda is a colossal gold-digging asshole (this book's not even pretending to have any depth to her character) who thinks nothing of calling Mac repeatedly to flat-out demand that she give her $3000 for her "broken heart" so she can recuperate at a spa, and then calls up asking for $2000 more a week later. Much as I hate to bring Real Life into my fiction at times, wedding photography in the New England burbs makes this much money in 2009? Mac can drop this kind of money on a fairly constant basis without flinching, much less freaking out or having to stop having expensive shoe shopping trips to console herself? Really?! Not that I know much about any of the above, but it just doesn't sound realistic to me that Mac isn't wigging more about the money, or at least cooling off her own spending in order to account for the sucking financial black hole that is her mother. This seemed even more financially unrealistic to me than reading the Born In books, somehow.
Anyhoo, Mac's mother is constantly harassing and guilting and phone-stalking and extorting money out of her, which Mac hands over with barely any protest any more. Everyone else around her finds this irritating, to the point where her friends end up stepping in for her to tell Crazy Mommy to go the hell away. And Crazy Mommy actually does yell out stuff like "I will RUIN YOU!" when she doesn't get her way, i.e. a June wedding with three months' notice. Way to Cruella deVil that one. This causes a wee WEE tiny bit of drama with Carter--namely, he has an ex-girlfriend who acts so much like Linda that Mac renames her "Corrlinda." But mostly, I felt like I was watching The Devil Wears Prada or rereading Because She Can again, because all you're doing is watching someone do awful things and waiting for their victim to finally get fed up enough to quit. And you know how I feel about that. In the end, the Final Straw isn't even much of one, and coworker/friend Parker is the one who does the dirty work, and it's not like Mac actually "quit" her mother at all.
Meh. Not recommended, folks. It's not an outright wall-banger one star book, but it isn't good and unless I hear that any other books in the series have more/better plots, I won't be checking the rest of it. Two stars.
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