The Wedding Crasher by Mia Sosa, narrated by Rebecca Mozo & Alastair Haynesbridge. A lot of fun and great narration.
The follow up to 2020’s The Worst Best Man, The Wedding Crasher features Lina’s cousin, Solange Pereira, and Max’s best friend, Dean Chapman.
The story is bookended by weddings – but I’m not going to say whose is at the end – you’ll have to listen to know. The wedding at the beginning is Dean’s – to Ella. Solange, roped in to helping out her makeup artist cousin, Natalia, at the wedding, overhears the bride-to-be professing her love to someone other than the groom. She’s not to know that Dean and Ella’s marriage was supposed to be a modern marriage of convenience. Still, exactly why Solange thinks it’s her place to stop the wedding remained a little unclear to me.
Because the marriage was based on friendship and mutual ambition, not ending up married didn’t crush Dean into dust – which does help him (and me, in the sense of believing him) when he falls into love with Solange only a few weeks later.
Dean is a lawyer for a big corporate firm on the partner track. He’s been working hard toward this goal for 8 years and it is within reach at last. A potential new hire (Kimberley) at the firm could bring with her a lucrative client (her father’s media business) and she has asked to spend time with some of the associates of the firms she’s interviewing with to get a feel for not just New York but the places where she might be working.
While the non-wedding didn’t damage Dean emotionally, it didn’t do him any favours professionally. An assumption is made that he’s crushed and therefore not the best person to show Kimberley and her partner around. If he can help lure Kimberley to the firm he’s a shoo-in for partner. His biggest rival (a jerk by the name of Peter) has also volunteered for the task. Peter is married so he’s likely to get the gig – until Dean concocts a story on the spot of he and Solange being old friends who realised they were far more to one another after the wedding-that-wasn’t. Now he just has to get Solange on board, keep up the lie to a suspicious Peter (they both get the chaperoning gig), lure the lawyer and win the partnership. Piece of cake.
Solange has a need for a fake relationship of her own as it happens. Her aunt and cousins from Brazil are coming into town soon and, following some peer pressure and family competitiveness, Solange’s mother has told them that Solange is at last in a happily committed relationship. No bother; Solange’s best friend is Brandon, her roommate. They can pretend to date while the cousins are in town. All good.
Okay, so the premise is pretty thin. But, if you can get past that (and I did) the rest of the story is fun, sexy and engaging. Dean has sworn off love for family reasons. Solange has vowed to never settle for anything less than true love for family reasons. Their chemistry is off the charts. Bingo bango bongo.
Peter tries hard to trip them up and set them up – which leads to some surprising engagements and steamy scenes which I won’t go into here. Again, fairly improbable but I liked it anyway.
The narration was great. Alastair Haynesbridge is a performer I’ve listened to before in a Cindy Gerard book and I was impressed by him then. Nothing in this listen changed that view. He has a touch of the Teddy Hamilton’s about him – he doesn’t have the same accent but there’s a similarity nonetheless.
Both narrators are called upon to say some Portuguese in the book. I’m no expert but the accent seemed pretty good to me from Mr. Haynesbridge. Ms. Mozo’s was better – likely from personal experience – but both were authentic.
The character voices of the various cast members were all very good, with the exception of one of Solange’s aunts who sounded (from Ms. Mozo) more like one of Marge Simpson’s sisters than I’d have liked. Otherwise, both performers gave a convincing depiction of the emotion on the page and brought their A-game when it came to Dean and Solange’s chemistry. There were perhaps a few too many improbabilities in the book but the strength of the narration easily overcame those issues.
Grade: B
