Once Upon a Wedding [Hardcover]

I value her writing for its deep insights into the human heart, emotional honesty and intensity, social consciousness, admirable and irresistible heroes, and the fact that most of her heroines must be Virgos like me. ;-)

So, it is with a sigh that I see that the trend I detected in The Last Good Man - away from romance and toward the kind of women's issues novels that Barbara Delinsky and Patricia Gaffney and many others also have embraced - is continuing. I sigh, because I find women's issues novels really, really boring ... but that's my bias, and obviously one many women don't share, or good novelists wouldn't find their editors encouraging them to write that kind of thing.

Once Upon A Wedding is about three generations of women and women friends, and only peripherally about a mature (nearly 50) woman discovering that she still loves her gifted, charming but unambitious ex-husband. I was reminded now and again of LaVyrle Spencer's Bygones in terms of situation, but not in impact, because I also wondered if Ms. Eagle was as bored by the constraints of this style as I am ... I experienced no deep involvement, no pangs, no real concerns about the people involved, no real liking, actually, for anyone in the book but Rosemary, with her cancer treatments and eBay addiction.

After Night Remembers and Sunrise Song, This Time Forever and Reason to Believe it's deeply disappointing to find Ms. Eagle's novels getting shorter and more superficial, apparently turning away from the things that draw me to read and re-read all of her earlier books, not just the mass market ones I mentioned above.

The story was forgettable with forgettable characters. Camille and her friends are in their late forties, but act and speak like they are in their eighties. Frump this; frump that.

Camille, who is openly concerned and whiny about her daughter dropping out of college, doesn't bat an eyelash when the daughter announces she is going to marry a childhood crush she met the day before at a wedding. Huh? If you are going to whine about something, this would be a good thing to crank about.

I don't know what happens in the end. Maybe she gets upset. I don't know...I couldn't make it past page 60.

If you like gather-around-the-girlfriends chick books flavored with a beige plot, this book is for you. If not, save your money and buy one of her other books.