Review! Wedding Night by Sophie Kinsella

Lottie is tired of long-term boyfriends who don’t want to commit to marriage. When her old boyfriend Ben reappears and reminds her of their pact to get married if they were both still single at thirty, she jumps at the chance. There will be no dates and no engagement—just a straight wedding march to the altar! Next comes the honeymoon on the Greek island where they first met. But not everyone is thrilled with Lottie and Ben’s rushed marriage, and family and friends are determined to intervene. Will Lottie and Ben have a wedding night to remember or one to forget?

Review: I was very excited about Sophie Kinsella’s new novel coming out. She is the Queen of chick-lit and so I eagerly pre-ordered this new masterpiece and got my hands on it as soon as I possibly could. When I actually sat down to start reading it, however, I found it a little hard to get into! You are landed straight into the action with Lottie in mid-proposal with boyfriend Richard, or so she thought. What then follows is a series of back and forth phone and text conversations between her and her sister Fliss. We get to know the character of Fliss to, and her take on the whole break-up. But I found this introduction a little disjointed and meant that I couldn’t get into the flow of the book until around about a third of the way through.

Although I found it difficult in the beginning, I found the reading the story form the two sisters’ points of view was really interesting. It’s not normally something that Kinsella does, but I thought that once the main action of the novel started to get going, it was a really good move and a great way to tell the story! I have to say I preferred sister Fliss to main character Lottie. I thought that the way Fliss lived her life was much more real than the way Lottie lived her life. I found Lottie to be needy and childish, and really couldn’t sympathise with the things she was going through. Fliss on the other hand had built up a successful career whilst looking after her son and going through an extremely painful divorce.

The men in this book were very well written too. Richard seems to have a short-lived role in the book initially, but he crops back up later on in the story and turns out to be a good, strong, male lead. Ben-Lottie’s new husband- is equally well written. I can tell this because I absolutely hated the guy! I thought he was selfish and needy and generally a bad choice for Lottie! Lorcan, his best friend is another character that I really liked. He does the clichéd thing that mean often do in novels like this of jumping to the wrong conclusion every two seconds, but he soon turns into a character which supports the character of Fliss very well.

I thought the idea of setting this novel on a Greek island was great, it gave the whole story an exotic feel, and it meant that the journey there for each of the characters was a whole story in itself! The sub-story of the guest house where Lottie and Ben had first met, and the characters of Arthur and Sarah seemed almost like an after thought and I thought this part of the tale was a bit weak, not what I expected. There were pure laugh out loud moments in the story, which is something that I love about Kinsella’s writing. I admit that I re-read a few pages just because I fancied laughing like that again. How can a book that makes you laugh that much be bad?

Overall, no Sophie Kinsella fan is going to be disappointed with her latest offering, however I don’t think that this novel would be the best one to start with for those whole have yet to discover this author. If you do find yourself struggling to get into the story initially, stick with it, it definitely picks up eventually. I read the last two thirds of the book all at once; I was enjoying it so much! It is definitely an enjoyable book, and I can’t wait until the next in the shopaholic series by the same author comes out!