The Bridesmaid Pact

by Julia Williams

[Leah]

Julia Williams has been a favourite author of mine since I read Pastures New a long while back and since then I’ve devoured her other books: Strictly Love, Last Christmas and her most recent novel The Summer Season. However, her fourth novel The Bridesmaid Pact has sat a bit forlornly on my shelf as I just haven’t found time to go back and read it yet what with all the other excellent books out. However, wanting a bit of a break from review books, and seeing that it didn’t seem to be too long a read, The Bridesmaid Pact filled the hole nicely.

I generally don’t have preconceived notions of books before reading them but with the pale blue cover and bridesmaid-led title, I figured The Bridesmaid Pact would be a fairly easy read about weddings. While there are a few weddings in the book, the book is about much more than that. It’s about four friends coming together after many years of fractured relationships and trying to stick themselves back together to try and fulfil a pact they made when they were young – to be bridesmaids at each other’s weddings. Back when Dorris, Caz, Beth and Sarah were 8 they made a pact: a pact to always be there for each other, to be bridesmaids at each other’s wedding, but so far as Caz and Beth and Sarah married, the pact wasn’t fulfilled, but Dorris is determined to make sure the pact will finally be fulfilled in her upcoming marriage to Darren.

All is not what it seems, however, as each of the women have their own troubles. Beth’s desperate to have a baby, worrying that a mistake in her past will damage her future; Caz has spent her life being reckless and destroying her friendships and wonders if there’s any way to make amends; Sarah is worried about her marriage, about whether she made the right decision; and Dorris is keeping a big, big secret from her friends. There’s a lot that goes on during the book – it’s almost as if there’s four books in one, in fact, and although I did enjoy each storyline, it did, at times, seem a bit too much. To fit four massive storylines into a novel under 400 pages is always going to be a stretch and despite massively enjoying the book, it could have been just as good if a storyline was cut to give more space to the other storylines abound.

When I read the synopsis for The Bridesmaid Pact I immediately drew my own thoughts. I didn’t think I’d like Caz, I thought Dorris was a bit of a daydreamer, I thought Beth was a bit shy and that Sarah was a bit of a pushover. Despite some of it being true – Dorrie is a daydreamer (though not detrimentally, in fact, it’s nice to read of someone lusting after a fairytale, Disney-style wedding) and Sarah is a bit of a push-over, I couldn’t have been more wrong. I loved Caz, despite her faults and flaws. Because she acknowledged her wrongs I was able to like her. Sarah, too, was great and I adored Dorrie – she was just so likeable, you just couldn’t dislike her if you tried. Beth was the only one with a question mark. She was sweet, sure, but her secret (which I guessed really quickly) was a bit unfair of her to conceal, I felt. It seemed somewhat out of kilter with the Beth she was supposed to be, all sweet and light and adverse to confrontation of any kind.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed The Bridesmaid Pact. It was a relatively quick read, all in all and despite being somewhat heavier than I expected, I enjoyed seeing how the girls dealt with their issues and problems and how their friendship moved on and was repaired or not repaired as the pages progressed. Julia Williams is an excellent storyteller and I’m kind of sad now that I don’t have a novel of hers on my TBR shelf, that I need to wait for her next novel to read a new Julia Williams novel. I’d definitely recommend The Bridesmaid Pact, it was a fun novel and I loved that the main focus was on the friendship of the four girls, novels about female friendship seem to be few and far between at the moment so it’s nice to read one for a change. Definitely recommended.