Jennifer Dupee

This might be the book for you if you like:

- stories about facing struggles
- complicated heroines

This book asks "Is a lie of omission really a lie". The answer in this case is a resounding "Yes" and the problem is that she straight out lies.

I liked the premise of the book, but something didn't work for me in the implementation. Perhaps it is that one of her first lies is something that she didn't NEED to lie about, so it made her a little unreliable in my eyes.

I could relate to the struggles she was going through, but not at all with how she dealt with them. Some of the situations she put herself in were honestly cringeworthy. (I really struggled to empathize with her. One simple lie of omission quickly snowballed into something much bigger until there was seemingly no way out (but the inevitable). I also felt like her love interest, Jack, was also dealing very poorly with the struggles in his life.

What is done well:
The author has done a fantastic job with setting, and I fell in love with the little town, and with the townspeople that populated it. They were charming and friendly, and I could easily picture the setting. I also loved her sweet dad and everything he was doing to deal with her mom's Alzheimers.

The cover is lovely, but the story doesn't really have much to do with the bridal shop other than it's the place where all the drama kicks off.

Perhaps if this were more of a comedy than a drama, the snowballing lies would have been hilarious.


Ultimately, this is a story about facing your truths, which both Larisa and Jack had to do in the end. It had a lot of potential, but it didn't quite hit the mark for me.… (meer)

Thank you to St. Martin's Press and The Girlfriend for this book.

The title is very deceiving. At first I thought a cute bridal shop in a small town. It was but that wasn't the premise of the book! I'm not going to give away why the bridal shop was relative to this book since it would be a definite spoiler but let's just say it was part of a series of lies Larisa told which really bugged me at first until she came clean as she put it.

It was a cute book. Typical of what I've read, relative dies and leaves a house to another relative, i.e., daughter, son, granddaughter, etc. to be renovated, and in this case it was a great-niece and it needed to be upgraded and renovated.

Jack and Larisa were friends growing up in this small town, and he always did chores for Larisa's great-Aunt Ursula. The feelings comes back but Jack's marriage is in trouble and he moves into the house for that reason and to help finish renovating the house with her. Larisa's mother has dementia and has really never wanted to deal with it and avoided seeing her parents. They finally move into the house with her which was at the end of the book so no idea what the future held.

The ending was a nice surprise and wasn't what I expected which was sweet.… (meer)

Pros: Tackles grief, dementia, how well we know ourselves and how well we know others. I also appreciate the way the book ended (no spoilers). I enjoyed the hard-won catharsis that occurred for many of the characters.

It's always nice for me to see a "messy' book, and what I mean by that is -- realistic characters, flaws and all, and the strange, messy situations they find themselves in (or in some cases, the situations they create!)

Pro/con? I like when books don't have super hot and heavy physically intimate scenes. That's not to say I don't enjoy it at all because I do! But not every romantic book has to have ooh-aah moments described in detail, in my humble opinion. It doesn't always fit the mood of a book, know what I mean? I said "pro/con" because that might not be to people's liking if they're expecting ooh-aah moments.

This is a book about finding yourself, learning about family and facing hard truths about one's self, where you stumbled and how to get back up again.
… (meer)