Not everyone enjoys romances where the main issue is a lack of communication, but when done well, this is the best kind of contemporary romance in my opinion. So often assumption and miscommunication causes conflict in real life, and the point of contemporary romance, at least to my mind, is to show people meeting real challenges and overcoming them in the name of love.
The Bride’s Baby takes a man who does not believe in love to the point of marrying for convenience and pairs him with a gold digger who finds love. No, Tom McFarlane is not destined to go through with his planned marriage to Candida Harcourt. She falls for someone else and leaves him with the bills for an overblown fantasy wedding that never happened. Instead, it’s Sylvia Smith, Candida’s friend and the wedding coordinator hired to spend his money, who creeps in past his armor until he has to face up to the truth that love does exist it found him when he least expected it.
This book is more about Tom’s journey to love than Sylvia’s, but don’t for one minute think she’s a passive bystander. Sylvia believes in love to the point of crafting that perfect moment for everyone else. She’s been disappointed before, and like Tom, abandoned before the wedding. However, before you start to think Sylvie history makes her sympathetic, or the electric connection between them from their first meeting makes her weak, think again. The novel starts with Sylvie coming to collect on her substantial invoice because she needs the money to pay the many vendors who had already provided services for the wedding that would never be. And if that’s not reason enough for conflict, the man her friend eloped with was one of her staff.
While the title seems to give the story away, and yes, they do end up in bed together before their happily ever after is obtained, the conflicts and assumptions are all viable, confusing not just the main characters but others around them. It’s well written, well set up, and a fun book to read, with both heated moments and hard ones as fate and human nature seem determined to keep them apart.
Though I read this last year, as you can see, I retained a lot of the story, and am contemplating a re-read, something I rarely do, because I want to re-experience every step in their journey.
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I read this book two years ago and thought it was one of the best romances I had read for a long long time. Sylvia, Tom, and all the secondary characters are extremely well drawn. The conflict is one that cannot be resolved just by two people having a decent conversation with each other. The writing is excellent and the resolution is more than believable. And the glitz! Oh, the glitz!
LOL! Can’t say the glitz stuck in my head, but it was certainly an interesting glimpse at British society and the trouble of old money, new money, and lost money social status.
With the glitz, I was thinking of things like the wedding Candida had planned, and the decorations for the staged wedding. And yes, Fielding did an excellent job portraying the social distinctions and changes.
Oh, yes, when you mentioned it, I knew what you meant, but in typical me fashion, it’s the social commentary that struck more of a thread :).
The social commentary is definitely a major thread, and I don’t think the glitz would work nearly as well without it. Some books wallow in it, but Fielding uses it like fancy decoration on a delicious cake.
Very true. And she does it so well.