A Vintage Wedding

by Katie Fforde

[Leah]

Katie Fforde has long been a favourite author of mine and I look forward to her new books every single year without fail. So when I spotted A Vintage Wedding on Netgalley, I downloaded it immediately, excited to get started on yet another Katie Fforde read! The cover for A Vintage Wedding is gorgeous and I loved the idea of the three women starting up their own vintage wedding business, but there were bits of the novel I just didn’t really get on with, and it took me a little while to even get in to the novel, though I couldn’t tell you why; it just wasn’t clicking for me, which made me so sad.

The premise behind A Vintage Wedding was a good one – three ladies, Rachel, Beth and Lindy, decide on a whim (well, by whim I mean the redecoration of the great hall in their village) to start their own business offering vintage (cheap-ish) weddings. They organise it all from start to finish, including making the dresses, the cake, even going so far as to doing the bride’s make-up. I suppose this is where my problem with the novel lies. How terribly convenient that they could do all these skills, without training. Beth, in particular, who made the cake for their first wedding, from Youtube tutorials. Yes, sure, you can learn a lot from YouTube (putting on make-up is a popular one) but to learn how to ice and decorate a cake, properly? You must be joking. It just made a mockery (to me, anyway) of all those people who spend years learning how to decorate cakes and apply make-up and put together flowers that Beth, Lindy and Rachel could do it easy-peasy with no mistakes.

The one thing I did like in the novel was the romance. Particularly Rachel and Raff’s. When we first meet Rachel she’s so obsessive compulsive about cleaning and everything being the perfect shade of white (wevet?!?!) that I wasn’t sure how long I could put up with her frostiness towards anyone who even thought of darkening her threshold, but she slowly comes out of her shell and slowly stops being as obsessive compulsive as the novel wears on and she actually became my favourite character and Raff! How she resisted Raff so long, I will never know because he was just so lovely and sweet and persistant. Lindy, too, was lovely but it made me sad that everyone kept piling stuff on her already toppling plate. She was the gofer of the group and it made me so mad to see the way she was treated, especially as she had her boys to take care of, too.

I liked Beth, too. Or at least, I did like her, until she decided to change her sister’s wedding venue for a band. It just left me with my mouth open. Rachel, Lindy and Beth had spent so long getting the hall ready for Helena’s wedding and then to change venue at the last minute left me fuming, and I was surprised it didn’t leave them fuming, either. It was just so thoughtless and it really, really grated on my nerves. So as you can see, this was a topsy-turvy novel for me. I’ve always enjoyed reading Katie’s books and it makes me sad I didn’t enjoy A Vintage Wedding as much as I wanted to, there were just bits of the novel that didn’t really work for me, and the writing was a bit clunkier than I expected which made it hard for me to get in to. I was so disappointed, but lots of others will love the novel and the romance aspect was definitely the best bit for me.