A Million Dollar Wedding?
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Phoebe Stone is a woman from St. Louis who has traveled to Rhode Island to stay at a hotel she has dreamed of visiting. She had hoped to come to the Cornwall Inn with her husband, Matt, but things have not worked out in that regard. In fact, she is newly divorced. Thus, instead of a romantic weekend there, Phoebe comes to the hotel to have one last splurge before committing suicide at the hotel.
This is not a spoiler for the book as we learn this in the first few pages. We also learn of a major conflict to the planned suicide early on. The hotel is the venue for a lavish wedding. The bride, Lila, thought she had rented the entire hotel, but she was mistaken. Phoebe has a room. As Phoebe and Lila meet and figure this out, Lila is appalled. A suicide on the grounds would ruin her wedding. And Lila has worked very hard to make every last detail perfect for this million-dollar extravaganza of a wedding.
In the same way it is easy to confide in a stranger on an airplane, so is it easy for Phoebe and Lila to talk to each other and reveal themselves to each other. Before we know it, all suicide plans are off as Phoebe becomes not just a wedding guest, but the maid of honor when the original maid of honor cancels due to illness.
The stranger-on-an-airplane phenomena extends to lots of other people at the wedding who confide in Phoebe – the mother of the bride (Patricia), the groom (Gary), the best man (Jim), the groom’s young daughter (“Juice”), and on it goes.
It would be easy for this book to be a meaningless exploration of an over-the-top wedding. But the wedding is the perfect foil to the meaning-of-life issues explored by Phoebe, which would be heavy by themselves. And suicide is not the only meaty topic discussed in the novel.
As an example, in a conversation with the bride’s mother, Patricia tells Phoebe about her opposition to the wedding and what she said to Lila when she announced her plan to marry Gary. “Do not marry [a] man thinking he can save you from who you really are.” Patricia goes on to tell Phoebe more about Lila. “Every man she dates, she thinks they’re going to solve all her problems, make her this better woman, the one she ought to be. The woman she doesn’t know how to make herself be.” Of course, this is food for thought for the recently divorced Phoebe.
In another conversation, it is Gary who broaches a big topic. He is a recent widower pondering the nature of happiness and the presumption that it is even possible to be happy. Gary states his view, “I think we talk about happiness all wrong. As if it’s this fixed state we’re going to reach. Like we’ll just be able to live there, forever. But that’s not my experience with happiness. For me, it comes and goes. It shows up and then disappears like a bubble.” How does this apply to Phoebe and the unhappily-ever-after of her divorce?
Beyond all this, there is a second thing that elevates this book making it more than the story of a million-dollar wedding. It is the fact that Phoebe is a professor and scholar. And there’s every manner of discussion of classical fiction.
As an example, when Phoebe reads over the wedding speech she had written she says, “As a speech, it’s terrible. But as a literary analysis of the curious absence of weddings in Victorian marriage plots, it’s not bad. She likes the part about Jane Eyre getting married in under a sentence. And the paragraph about Jane’s failed wedding being the only wedding that Bronte describes in actual detail. And why would Bronte do that? Why spend more time writing the failed wedding than the successful one?”
Clearly, there is a lot of meat in this novel. So much more than one might expect from a book about a million-dollar wedding. I can see why this book was chosen as a Read with Jenna novel. And also why it was the readers’ choice award for best fiction in 2024 on Goodreads.
Give it a try!
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Click here to learn more about The Wedding People on Amazon.
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