Always the Bridesmaid (Cate Padgett Novel)

by Whitney Lyles

[Leah]

What do you do after you walk down the aisle in four weddings in a few months-none of them your own? What’s left after you’ve donned the must-have-not dresses of the season, forked over your cash, and fake-smiled your way through countless photos? After you’ve dealt with the smashed guest, the smooshed cake, the dashed hopes, and the missed bouquets? That’s what Cate Padgett is starting to wonder, as she embarks on stint after stint on the sidelines, watching friends swap bar-hopping for baby-naming…while her own love life goes nowhere fast. But is Cate unwilling to settle down-or just unwilling to settle? And can anyone really judge her if they haven’t walked in her dyed-to-match shoes? Wild, witty, and full of weddings to cry over, Always the Bridesmaid is an endearingly romantic comedy about standing out in the crowd even when everyone’s wearing the same celery-green dress…and daring to make every day The Happiest Day of Your Life.

With our Royal Wedding Week fast approaching, I was looking for wedding-themed books to review that we haven’t already reviewed on the site – no point reiterating reviews we’ve already put up and people have already read. It has to be said, there aren’t many left, not well known ones anyway. So I had a look around the Amazon Kindle store and found Always The Bridesmaid by Whitney Lyles. It’s the first of a trilogy (though I only found that out when I was half way through the book) and I started reading it with gusto. To be honest, I wasn’t mightily impressed, and I think I’m suffering from some major wedding fatigue. Three wedding books in a week does not make Leah a happy bunny, let me tell you.

Always The Bridesmaid is the most weddingy of the three wedding books I’ve read as it features a whopping four weddings, none of them Cate’s. Instead, Cate finds herself continually being the bridesmaid for her friends. From her wedding-obsessed friend Leslie to a costumed wedding on Halloween for best friend Beth. I do enjoy a good bridesmaid tale, but I did find Always The Bridesmaid to be very slow-going. I think it probably would have worked better if it had been told from Cate’s point of view, rather than the third-person narrative it has. It just makes it a bit more distant, using third-person, and it’s not as if the tale revolves around anyone bar Cate. It doesn’t switch from person to person, Cate is the central character.

I did enjoy the many different weddings, and I thought it was hilarious when Cate locked one of the bride’s exes in the bathroom at the Church and completely forgot about him. But unfortunately that humour doesn’t carry through the rest of the novel. I thought the relationship Cate had with boyfriend Paul to be incredibly annoying. What does it say when she renames him No Call Paul? And I thought he was super pretentious. Who, apart from a Spanish/South American person, says ‘Hola’ and ‘Adios’ to people? It made him sound like the total idiot he was and I cringed every time he said ‘Hola’ or ‘Adios’. I wanted to batter him, he incited some real violence in me! Their relationship just seemed doomed from the beginning, quite frankly, and I just thought Cate was wasting her time on a total idiot.

I did like Cate, in a general oh-so-you’re-the-main-character way and not in any real likeable way. The narrative just seemed so distant that I couldn’t real get a handle on Cate. I thought the book did start well, but I just didn’t think it kept the pace throughout and I felt myself getting a bit bored as the book got to the middle as nothing was really happening. Cate’s and Paul’s relationships limps on for ages, there are no real wedding dramas, and it just felt as if there needed to be a bit more action. So it might have been the most wedding-y book I read, but unfortunately it wasn’t the best book I’ve read recently and I found myself majorly disappointed with the book. Usually, I’d happily read sequels, but I just don’t see myself picking up the other two novels that feature Cate. It was a fairly quick read, but only because I wanted to get finished, more than any real desire to complete the novel.