Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

Yes, I am late to the party. Yes, the rest of the world of book reviewers read this book and reviewed it already. Tons of people have read this book for their book clubs. Somehow, I got behind on this one. Last night, well after midnight, I finished The Wedding People by Alison Espach (Henry Holt and Co., 2024). Today, I have a massive book hangover. It’s the price you pay when you read into the night.

The book description in Goodreads calls this book “a propulsive and uncommonly wise novel…” I also found it propulsive. When I sat down to write this review, I went to the first page to see what the very first sentence was, because I had the impression (after the fact) that it was a giant hook that grabbed me and pulled me in.

“The hotel looks exactly as Phoebe hoped.”

However, as you can see, it is an ordinary sentence, in fact, it is an ordinary sentence in an ordinary paragraph. Yet, somehow, I was indeed propelled forward, caught up in the magic of Alison Espach’s words, of her phrases, of her writing style, of her dry, sharp wit, of her cleverness.

Someone should write a book about first lines of famous novels. My younger daughter made me some prints for my classroom when I started teaching with the first lines of some of the books I was teaching.

Side note: If I ever finish my debut novel, and if I find an agent, and if my agent finds a publisher, well, I will ask my daughter to make me one of these prints with the first sentence. (No pressure there, right? I’ve changed my first sentence a thousand times since I started writing that book!)

What is it about first lines of novels that makes them so memorable. Here’s the first line from my favorite:

“Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderley again.”

For me, that first line of Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier captures the essence of the famous gothic novel, immortalized by Alfred Hitchcock in the Oscar award winning movie of the same name starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. It foreshadows that the speaker of that sentence, the main character, who is never referred to by her given name EVER in the entire book, is far away from Manderley. It paints a dreamy, or rather nightmarish, picture of the whole story, to the whole novel. There’s a reason that one sentence, all of nine words, is so famous.

Espach’s first line of The Wedding People is just a statement, the hotel looks like she had imagined, like she hoped. Since this story is told in contemporary times, she has googled the hotel many times on her laptop, and therefore, she knows exactly what it looks like. She has perhaps taken a screenshot of the hotel from its website. Maybe she has made it the wallpaper on her iPhone. Maybe she pulls up the website and looks at the hotel often, as part of her never-ending quest to swim out of the massive depression in which she has been drowning for two years. No wonder she wants to stare at the ocean. For her, her very life, her day to day existence, has been this dark, murky, swirling mass of waves. She’s trying to keep her head above the water, but she is tired, too tired to keep treading water. So, in that respect, Espach has accomplished her goal. She is setting the stage for what is to come. A stay at a luxury hotel on the sea. Sure, read on, lol.

But then, you start turning the pages (or clicking, since I read this on my Kindle), and the major shock, the big twist, happens, right there on page 14, whammo!

Boy, do I want to drop a truckload of spoilers here. But, I won’t, just in case some of you reading this might also have this on your TBR list and just haven’t gotten to it yet.

In this brief exchange (lol) between the main character/protagonist Phoebe and Lila, a gorgeous, wealthy, young blonde who is soon to be married, we learn a lot about the bride, who has rented out the hotel, the ENTIRE hotel, a Victorian mansion in Newport, Rhode Island, for her “wedding week.”

“Well, like, six days if you want to be technical about it.”

There is so much about this book that I loved. Yes, it is propulsive. Is it a romcom? No, but it is funny. It is clever, sophisticated and dry. It’s witty. There is a scene that starts on page 91. It takes place in the hotel hot tub. It is a master class in wit, in clever repartee. This scene takes just 8 pages, the first meeting of Phoebe and a man who gets in the hot tub shortly after she got in, and it is picture-perfect in every way.

Is it a romance? In some ways yes, but it is so much more than that. We have different levels of love in the couples in this book: Phoebe and Matt, who have been married for ten years, childless after many years of trying everything, and then we have Lila and Gary, drawn together by coincidence, held together by sheer willpower. Yet, when Espach describes love, she does so outside of the realm of these two couples:

“Love is visible—it paints the air between two people a different color, and everyone can see it.”

The pacing of this book is interesting. Instead of chapters as in a traditional novel, each “chapter” or section of the book is named simply by the day of the week, for example, “Tuesday: The Opening Reception.” We operate in real time, as this week unfolds, along with all of its drama, its intrigue, its minor characters who add to the many layers of this story, the story of love and loss and love and loss and love again. The epigraph she has chosen captures perfectly the pacing, and subsequently the mood, of this book:

It was awful, he cried, awful, awful!

Still, the sun was hot. Still, one got over things.

Still, life had a way of adding day to day.

Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Even so, I found the first section, the interior life of Phoebe, to be slow-going. I would tire of her self-analysis, her paranoia, her constant self-imposed pressure to be buttoned-down, to be perfect without calling attention to herself, to plan out and research and outline every step of her life.

“You honestly expect me to believe that people go on vacations without making a spreadsheet of fun first?”

And then, when I had had my fill of Phoebe, Ms. Espach would throw in a healthy dose of Lila, just the medicine that Phoebe has needed for so long. You see, Lila. Just. Doesn’t. Care. She is who she is, 100%. She will say it like it is. She will bark out orders with no please or thank you attached. She will spend an absolute fortune so that her wedding week is exactly how she wants it. She is Lila. The. Bride.

“How long does it take to bring up some floss?” “Carlson has to go to CVS to buy it. Apparently they don’t have any.”

“So he’s going to CVS to get it?”

“It’s literally his job.”

“Is it?”

Is it a mystery? Well, it certainly is a mystery as to how this whole wedding week will shake out. Multiple reviews of this book said, “I had no idea how this book would end.”

And this is what I think Espach did so well. The ending is so perfect, so <chef’s kiss>, so heart-breaking and heart-stopping. I’d love to spoil that in a big way, but I won’t. Just read it for yourself. It’s so worth it. Even if you too end up with a book hangover.