Wedding in Great Neck by Yona Zeldis McDonough

I was browsing through my library’s eBook collection right before a recent trip to the beach and looking for something distracting and immersive to read. Wedding in Great Neck caught my attention due to the gorgeous cover (I mean, seriously, that dress) and the title. I like weddings, I know nothing about Great Neck – thus, escapism and some nerdy learning was in store. I clicked borrow with little hesitation.

The story takes place over the course of one day, during Angelica’s wedding in her mother’s sprawling mansion in Great Neck. A large Jewish family, the cast of characters is rich and diverse, each appearing realistic without taking up too much of the narrative space.

In a way, this book is entirely about the wedding and in others, it has nothing to do with it. As with any family, there are secrets and miscommunications, different people love different people more than others or in different ways and that causes conflict nonetheless. There’s a meddling, opinionated great-grandmother, a grandmother on her second lease on life after divorcing her alcoholic husband, a mother who is dealing with choices her husband made and a daughter who is having a sort of political awakening and seems like a right brat, to be frank.

It’s not a book easy to summarize for that reason – it’s about a wedding, but it’s really about people (as all weddings are, clearly) and about the drama which ensues when vows are being made and celebrated.

The ending, however, is crap and I shut the book annoyed with the author for leading us to where she led us to. It is for that reason that I can’t in good conscience recommend this book to anyone. I largely enjoyed it until the last few pages.

Super classy wedding means super classy champagne, but we here at Beverages and Books dream on a budget, so let’s go with prosecco, shall we?

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