Review: On the Way to the Wedding by Julia Quinn

What a bittersweet experience it was to read the eighth and final book in the Bridgerton series. On the Way to the Wedding is Gregory's story, in which he falls for the charms of Hermione Watson. This would be fine, except for two things. First everyone is in love with Hermione. Second, Hermione's particularly irritating best friend Lucy is always hanging around. Then Hermione finds herself caught in a compromising situation with Lucy's brother which can only be fixed by marrying her, then Gregory realises that it is Lucy that he has been in love with the whole time and then he discovers that Lucy is betrothed to another and no one, especially not her scheming uncle and rotten soon-to-be father-in-law are going to let her back out of in a hurry. Can love, and the virtue of being a Bridgerton possibly conquer all this time?

This was such a fun read with a number of surprising twists and turns that kept me eagerly reading well into the night. Quinn treats her characters well, but never makes the mistake of taking the subject matter too seriously, which leads to some amusing situations. Like many of the Bridgerton novels this one is a retelling of another story, this time around putting Hamlet into a regency romance setting, which I found quite entertaining.

Overall, this one was a great end to a series that I never, ever expected to love quite so much as I did. Of course, there are some Bridgerton prequels out there, and Quinn has also written some other series that are set in the same world and feature some of the same characters, and I dare say that I will enjoy them too.

Recommended.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Peppermint Patty: I Cried and Cried and Cried

Image
Unrequited love is a common theme in the Peanuts Comics and is one that I have previously explored on this blog. We know that Lucy loves Schroeder, Sally loves Linus and Charlie Brown has a crush on the unseen, unnamed and utterly unattainable Little Redhaired Girl. But perhaps the saddest unrequited love stories from the comic is that which ran in late June 1972. It was the series of strips where the usually self-confident Peppermint Patty came face-to-face with the Little Redhaired Girl with the intention of thumping her and then something surprising happened: Here we have a usually self-confident girl, who is funny, unashamedly herself and talented at sports reduced to tears by the realisation of who she is not and never can be. I really feel for her in this series of comic strips. She knows that Charlie Brown can never love her, when he is so hung up over a girl who represents a supposedly ideal feminine beauty. Fortunately Linus, the most spiritual member of the Pean
Read more

Phrases and Idioms: Tickets on Himself

To have tickets on himself: (Australian slang.) To be conceited or vain. To have an overinflated opinion of oneself.  He's got tickets on himself if he thinks that any woman would fall for that. I was thinking about this particular bit of Australian slang the other day, after my boss said, "He's got tickets on himself," to describe the actions of a particular individual. At the time, I smiled, knowing exactly what the boss meant. Later on, I started to ponder on this unusual phrase and wondered where it might have come from. A search on google helped me find the definition, but that was about all. There are no references to it being used in pop culture or literature (if you find one, let me know,) and at the time of writing this post, Tickets on Himself was not listed on Urban Dictionary. (I tried to add it, but the fuckers rejected my definition. They probably think I have tickets on myself or something for trying to add a relatively common piece of A
Read more

Who Else Writes Like V.C. Andrews?

Image
Are there any other authors out there who write similar novels to V.C. Andrews? This is a question I see asked frequently in excellent fan run V.C. Andrews Facebook groups like Attic Secrets and The Dolls Club. In times gone by, The Complete V.C. Andrews webpage (which is no more, but the best bits are archived by Lorraine at the Attic Secrets blog,) had a comprehensive list. Today, I thought I would put forward a few of my own thoughts and recommendations. (Note: This will focus mainly on the series and novels written by the actual V.C. Andrews and not ghostwriter Andrew Neiderman, who has a distinctive writing style of his own.) The Classics This is probably the best place to start, as it is likely that some of these novels influenced V.C. Andrews herself. Andrews was a fan of Charles Dickens, mentioning the author in the prologue of her most famous novel Flowers in the Attic. I have yet to read all of Dickens novels (I've read about half,) but I can feel a slight V.C. Andrews vi
Read more