Our score
Excellent
The Wedding People
Alison Espach's The Wedding People sends a woman at the end of her rope to a grand Newport hotel that has been booked out for somebody else's wedding, then turns the collision into a comedy about staying alive. Expect sharp dialogue, an unlikely friendship between the stray guest and the bride, and far more feeling than the setup admits to.
From the review
A hotel full of wedding guests is a machine for small talk, and Alison Espach drops into the middle of it the one person in the building with no reason left to be polite. Phoebe Stone arrives at the Cornwall Inn in Newport with no luggage, in a green dress bought for a life she no longer has, carrying a plan for the weekend that nobody else at the inn would recognize as a plan. Everyone assumes she is with the wedding. Then the bride knocks on her door, and the novel finds the engine it runs on for the next three hundred pages. That engine is talk. Espach writes conversation with an ear for the third-most-honest thing a well-mannered person will say, and the scenes between Phoebe and the bride keep circling the same lovely problem from new angles: one woman says the unsayable because consequences have stopped applying to her, and the other, who has organized every detail of the weekend against disaster, turns out to have been waiting years for someone to ask her a real question. A rehearsal dinner here is never about the rehearsal dinner. It is about who at the table is still performing.
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