Review: she made me sit through a wedding
Rating: 3 out of 5
Date: 02 17, 2014
I was looking for a classic formula with a sweet little romance... and that's about the essence of what you get here.  Easy reading with fairly likable characters.  Only it leaned far too much into predictable and simplistic.  I kinda didn't mind how much older these leads are (55 & 49) than what's typical in lesfic as they are youthful and likable enough.  But half of this novel is all about the PERFECT wedding and doting on your oh so beautiful grown up kids-- really like you're looking back on your life instead of living it.  The eye-rolling boredom that ensued on my behalf may very well speak to my own lack of maternal qualities and my own disinterest in traditional unions.  But I don't want to sit through a wedding for THAT MUCH of a story any more than I want to sit through a book about shopping.But I can be bribed with the promise of hot sex.  Nope.  Just a couple of polite fade-to-black scenes.  And I think that suits this particular story.  These older women are a little old school proper east coast white ladies and I mighta been a tad icked out if it'd gotten too graphic.  Like thinking of mom having sex.  Now I'm not some 20 yr old.  But these leads are way more mature than me... I guess I really wasn't the target audience for this one.Basically, this whole book is about two single mothers with dead exes who meet on a Virginia farm when their grown up children marry each other.  Joan is the tall, blonde and wealthy New Yorker who flies her family in on their personal jet to attend this 10-day family-fest.  I gathered she was some kind of femme-side, but she still wears a tux at the wedding.  Her wife has been dead for 10 years now but she hasn't been able to let her go and hasn't seen anyone for TEN YEARS.  Dang.  That's a long time!!  She's got a handful of children, and for the life of me, I never got any of their names straight even though (or because) every scene was crowded with characters.  So we'll just call them Marsha, Jan, and Cindy.Forty-nine year old Evey runs this Virginia farm and seems to have been raised in 1932 America when it comes to her love life.  She was forced to marry a man she never loved and then stayed with him squeezing out pup after pup:  Greg, Peter, and Bobby (yeah, I can't remember their names either).  Luckily the lesfic gods broke his neck or something in a horse accident so this one's been alone for TWENTY years as far as I could tell.  (And I have no words for a 20 yr celibacy- ack)  When Joan shows up they both take turns denying their attraction...  and picking the cobwebs off their private parts, I guess.  Holy cow, ladies!!  It's about time!!!!!!Initially, I felt these women were appealing and classy in a nice-girl-from-Connecticut sort of way.  But here's my issue with the denial game when you're 49 & 55...  glaucoma, arthritis, alzheimer's, stroke, irritable bowel syndrome-- get my drift?!  C'mon, ladies.  The clock is ticking!!  Why waste time?  I just thought they were being silly and should know better at their age.Overall, waaay too many characters here.  I spent way too much time trying to figure out who was whose children.  Conflicts were overly contrived. The homophobia here was such a caricature of homophobes (and then disappeared suddenly and conveniently).  And while I liked Joan at first, I kinda hated her after the way she uses Monica... that third wheel planted solely to make Evey jealous, really.  I don't like it when women are mean to women like that.  Especially when she loves you... it was childish and cruel.  No class at all.And while I appreciate an author who can AT LEAST give me the hair color of the leads... you better give me more when all I know or remember is they are both blondes and one wears a tux.  Too much blonde.  Give me more to distinguish them besides farm girl and rich girl.But I guess if you like wedding details and moms who talk mostly about their kids... and if you swoon at sexlessly isolating yourself for a decade or two over the dead ex... this is the romance for you.  There is a simple sweetness here.  I just didn't identify with or care much for these characters.  And definitely not the wedding and the mother-daughter relationships here at all.  It was weirdly perfect- even the flawed ones, lol.  And I guess families like that exist... just not where I come from.2.5 - 3 stars