Your incandescent smile short-circuited my brain. I can’t stop thinking about you, and I will be eternally grateful if you agree to have dinner with me.

                                                                – Gavin pg. 44 of my Nook

 Review: 4 Stars

The Wedding Beat is the kind of read where I found myself laughing out loud every minute or so at a quick and poignant joke buried in the literature.

For those who do not know, The Wedding Beat is a romantic comedy, about a  lonely wedding columnist’s quest for true love.

Gavin Green is a journalist for one of the nation’s leading newspapers, but writing stories about extravagant weddings is no fun when you’d rather be the one saying, “I do”.

Things seem to turn around when a beautiful travel writer walks into his life, opening his eyes to the possibility of making a connection deeper than pen and paper.

The sentences are so well written, the paragraphs so free of clichés’ and wordiness, allowing the chapters to read like the opening to headline news.

Yet I never expected anything less from a New York Times journalist.

The fact every chapter was structured so there was a beginning, a climax, and an end was the strawberry topping on my sundae.

Such structure evokes the same kind of feeling you get when your favorite television series ends for the week, and you find yourself waiting impatiently for the next week to roll around.

I would flip to the next chapter just to ease the feeling of lost in my chest.

Now I’m the kind of girl who’ll read anything as long as the plot is flawless and the style profound. However my tastes favor slow, character-driven novels where a lot of detail is not just given to characters, but the world in which they live.

What detail is in this book is there only to further the plot. So I have not noticed any long, drawn out descriptions of wedding halls, exotic cuisine, and blowing wind.

Such long descriptions can be used well to ease the reader into a new world, a technique I would have used in the beginning of the novel.

I found the first two chapters to be jarring, but by chapter four I was able to fasten my seatbelt and cruise through the rest of the book.

My favorite line –

The way I look at it, Mike found me. He found me over and over. Even though I didn’t know that I was lost.

                                                – uttered by Amy pg. 63 of my Nook.

Related articles

• Devan Sipher’s The Wedding Beat beats all romance novel cliches (lawreigns.com)
• Devan Sipher Defies Publishing Sexism with a Romantic Comedy about A Nice Guy (blogher.com)