Save the Date

by Morgan Matson

[ladygrey]

This is a pretty funny book. I laughed out loud a few times which is pretty rare.

The thing that works is the dynamic between the siblings. Their funny and sweet and honest and they're pretty entertaining.

The romance is pretty much what you expect from the first few pages. But it's not the main storyline so that's not really a problem. It works to accent everything else.

But Charlie... she's a decent enough protagonist, especially when she's handling wedding stuff. But in the third act she's so naive and petty that isn't annoying. For the most part, she just wants everything to go back to the way it was. Which isn't so bad as far as wistful nostalgia goes. But her attitude toward Mike, and that awful line she has while their eating cake severed so much goodwill for her. She so flippant in telling Mike he said things he didn't mean and he should just apologize for it. But he did mean them and he should have! And for Charlie, for the entire family, not to recognize that and call her out on it soured that whole sub-plot. The upside is that Charlie's arc is reasonable and works pretty well. There's just those few parts that could have been easily edited so they weren't so inane.

Also, speaking of the feud... their mother sacrificed her son for the sake of her career. And she uses the lame excuse that the syndicate really wanted it and thought it was funny - why was she telling them in the first place?! She betrayed her son's privacy and she doesn't even apologize. The apology in the strip seemed significant but also a kind of cowardly way to deal with the whole thing. I get that some of that was to create conflict, but if anyone had stood up to her for Mike, if what she did had split the family then it would have created more conflict, not less. Save the Date does such a good job creating a dimensional family that it could have kept the lighthearted, warm tone and banter and still let in an undercurrent of resentment and strife to it wouldn't have been so terribly one sided.

As annoying and poorly handled as that is, it's just a sub-plot. And the banter and shenanigans among the siblings makes this a pretty fun read.