Review Trouble At the Wedding by Laura Lee Guhrke
Annabel is about to marry the perfect man . . .
The last thing Miss Annabel Wheaton desires is true love. She learned the hard way that love makes a woman foolish and leads only to heartache. That’s why she agreed to marry an earl who needs her money. He’s got a pedigree and a country estate, and he won’t ever break her heart. There’s only one problem . . .
Christian isn’t about to let her marry that pompous prig . . .
Christian Du Quesne, Duke of Scarborough, thinks the stubborn heiress is about to make the biggest mistake of her life, and he’s determined to stop her. Tempting beautiful women is Christian’s forte, after all. When her family offers him a nice sum of money to stop the wedding, he’s happy to accept.
Falling in love with Annabel was never supposed to be part of the bargain . . .
So you take a woman about to marry a barron on a cruise, an american heiress and you stick her on this cruise liner with a bunch of other whackadoo characters and you have her family object to the fact that she is about to marry this baron that no one likes, well mainly because she is rich and hty don’t want to lose conrrol of that but then you add into the pot that Annabel is headstrong, defiant and overall her own person and that makes the mixture that much more interesting.
So what do you do, you hire a Title rich but money poor handsome Duke to try to seduce Annabel, but when that doesn’t work, then what? You have him stand up and announce that he seduced her at her own wedding, thus ruining her for, well everyone. Then you have the immediate, OH NO!!! What are we going to do backpedaling, so then you have her get fake engaged to said Duke… and the WTF-ery continues on for another 1/3rd of the book until they both realize they were in fact in love with each other the whole time and this was their way of dancing around it.
But the trouble with this book is, it makes no sense. A guy tries to seduce you, you say nah, then he stands up and publicly calls you a whore for all intents and purposes, because he’s getting paid by your family members to break up your wedding and theres no backlash on your family members? You’re not angry, at them at all for putting you in this situation, you’re just going to go on and try to soldier through? I get accepting your fate gracefully but falling in love with the guy after he has essentially ruined you for everyone else is simply ridiculous. Then the whole fake engagement thing and everything else that happened afterwards was just facrical. It really was just nonsensical.
If it hadn’t been for the characters of Annabel and Christian himself this would have been completely unsavable as a piece of fiction. Forutnately they were interesting enough, created with enough depth of character and true personality, and infused with such likeability that they made this book slightly palatable for me.
Overall Rating: D+
