©picture by scribbles (Marye McKenney)

Wednesday, January 6, 2016

And We're Goin' to the Chapel,...

And we're gonna get married . . .

Rachel Hauck has written a book that takes place over sixty years, contains two romances, and a bit of skullduggery.

Jimmy Westbrook has a wedding chapel on his land that he built when he fell in love with Colette, hoping that she would become his bride. When she rebuffed him, he wanted to burn it down, but his father refused to allow him to do so.

Colette has been Vivica on Always Tomorrow from the show's inception until its closure. She is now at loose ends and unsure what to do next.

Taylor Branson is a photographer who wants to get her chops in advertisement photographer. She has been married for only six months, but she is having doubts about her husband's love for her.

Jack Forrester is an advertising executive who just lost his most important account, and he is Taylor's husband. Taylor and Jack eloped on Martha's Vineyard with the "backdoor" to the marriage, saying that if it didn't work out, they'd walk away, "no muss, no fuss."

Taylor has been offered a photography job in Heart's Bend, Tennessee, to take pictures of Jimmy's wedding chapel for Architecture Quarterly--the kind of job she has been looking for. While she is in Heart's Bend, she takes the time to go through her grandmother's house that had been left to her and finds secrets that have been hidden for sixty years.

Rachel uses several devices to pull this story together, Jimmy, Colette, Jack, and Taylor each get to tell the story from their own point of view. She also flashes back to 1948 to set the stage for Jimmy and Colette to fall in love, and for Colette's sister to drive the wedge between them. I found the flash-backs and the transitions between character/narrators to be rather distracting in understanding the story well. The story has a good premise, but I feel there might have been a less-cumbersome way to tell it. I give the novel four stars, because it's pretty good in spite of the clunkiness.

My thanks to Zondervan for allowing me to read and review this book.

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