The Wrong Bridesmaid by Lauren Landish, narrated by Teddy Hamilton & CJ Bloom. It was okay.
Wyatt Ford returns to the small town of Cold Springs for his brother’s wedding. His brother, Winston, said please. That’s the only reason Wyatt deigned to return after leaving town after dropping out of college. He wanted to get away from the Ford family influence and make his own way in life. But Hazel Sullivan, BFF of the bride (Avery) has Wyatt rethinking his plans in The Wrong Bridesmaid.
A large portion of the town of Cold Springs regards the Ford name as an epithet nowadays. Wyatt’s father, Bill, the mayor is no longer popular. He has spent too much time and effort in supporting his brother Jed, a developer who wants to make a lot of money and doesn’t much care who he hurts while he does it. Jed’s latest scheme will see families turned off their farms to make way for a new housing development and there is a significant protest movement about it.
Wyatt has no idea of course but he walks smack bang into the middle of the controversy when he comes back to town. Hazel and her family are solidly team no development and, to add to the angst, Hazel’s beloved Aunt Etta is #NotOverIt about her breakup with Jed decades before when they were engaged and he cheated on her with her best friend.
You’d think then that there would be more resistance to a relationship between Wyatt and Hazel but such resistance as there is is over fairly quickly. Wyatt proves himself to be no friend of Jed’s and he’s clearly his own man.
The attraction between Hazel and Wyatt is off the charts so after a bit of dancing around one another, they can’t help but give in.
The conflict then becomes mostly about the development and the upcoming town council meeting which will vote on rezoning to make way for Jed’s housing estate and just a little bit about whether Wyatt will be leaving town to return to his bespoke carpentry business. (Apparently Wyatt can just leave his business for weeks on end and this isn’t a problem.)
The romance is fairly low conflict once it gets going which I liked but the story itself was fairly generic. Nothing offensive or bad, but nothing particularly new or fresh either.
The narration was better than the story but that’s to be expected with performers the calibre of Teddy Hamilton and CJ Bloom. Both are very experienced and talented, with a good range of accents and character voices, great timing and tone. But even as good as they were, I still found myself interrupting the listen for other things – podcasts or music – because the story wasn’t holding my interest.
I can’t complain about the narration – there was nothing wrong with it. The performances were very strong. But the story’s path felt well-trodden and a little tired.
I did like that Hazel was something of an unusual character; confident, sex positive, tough and self-sufficient and a shark at pool. But overall, The Wrong Bridesmaid was just okay for me.
Grade: C
