Wedding Season [Paperback]

Darcy Cosper (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 23, 2004

Seventeen weddings. Six months. Only the strong survive.

Joy Silverman and her boyfriend, Gabriel Winslow, seem perfect for each other. Living together in New York City, they have everything they want and everything in common--most important, that neither one wants to get married. Ever.

But when Joy finds herself obligated to attend seventeen weddings in six months (including those of her father, mother, younger brother, and five of her closest girlfriends), the couple is forced to take a new look at why they're so opposed to marriage when the rest of the world can't wait to walk down the aisle. As the season heats up and the pressure mounts, Joy must confront what it means -- and what it costs -- to be true to one's self.

A witty, wicked comedy of manners in the satirical tradition of Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh, Wedding Season is an intelligent, laugh-out-loud funny examination of friendship, faith, integrity, and the ideas and institutions that bind us together, shape our lives, and define who we are.

"If Jane Austen and Candace Bushnell were to meet for a long drink in a downtown bar, the delightful result might be a contemporary comedy of manners with a decidedly old-fashioned feel. Darcy Cosper has given us just that: a sweet and sharply funny concoction that will have bridesmaids everywhere nodding their heads in recognition." -- Dani Shapiro, author of Family History

"Wonderful....Wedding Season is social comedy on a grand scale. A hilarious and urbane primer on getting hitched-or not-in the twenty-first century." -- Gary Shteyngart, author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Seventeen weddings in six months—what's a girl to do? Especially when she's Joy Silverman, who's perfectly happy in her relationship with Gabe and perfectly adamant about her refusal to ever get married. First, there was the breakup of her parents' marriage and her mother's subsequent emotional meltdown; second, there's the lack of any "empirical evidence that marriage is really all useful or effective these days, that it does anything for relationships and the people in them." But most of Joy's friends and acquaintances—not to mention her recently betrothed mother, father and younger brother—do believe in marriage. Thank goodness cynical Joy's artsy hunk of a boyfriend agrees with her that marriage is as outdated as "using leeches or bloodletting." But everyone keeps asking when Joy and Gabe will tie the knot, a situation that causes Joy no small amount of turmoil. So, from April to September, Joy and Gabe dance and drink and toast; in between weddings, Joy spends plenty of time with pals at the Pantheon, her favorite New York City watering hole. Despite the whirlwind of nuptials, Cosper manages to keep each ceremony distinct (some are formal, some involve paparazzi, some are same-sex commitment ceremonies). Cosper's dialogue can get too jokey, and there are a few too many self-consciously colorful characters. But Joy's narration is sly and sharp, and Cosper doesn't fall into the happily-ever-after trap readers of hip chick fiction have come to expect.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Joy Silverman can't understand how she got herself into such a predicament--her date book says she's accepted invitations to 17 weddings in six months, including those of her mother, father, younger brother, aunt, and five of her oldest and dearest friends. What makes it even more astonishing is that Joy doesn't believe in the institution of marriage--at least for herself. Almost 30, a successful ghostwriter and living with Gabe for more than a year, Joy is happy and content with where her relationship stands and is vocally adamant about not getting married. But with all the showers, dress fittings, rehearsal dinners, and weddings, Joy finds herself rethinking her position on marriage. When Gabe proposes at a surprise party, Joy must finally decide if she really is antimarriage, possibly commitment phobic, or just finding excuses to not marry Gabe. It is a charming and satirical look at love, marriage, and what happens to people with less-than-conventional convictions when society challenges them at every turn. Carolyn Kubisz
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 342 pages
• Publisher: Three Rivers Press; 1ST edition (March 23, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400051452
• ISBN-13: 978-1400051458
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,189,239 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Nice premise, poor execution, April 27, 2004

By 

J S (Chicago, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wedding Season (Paperback)

This should have been a much better book than it turned out to be. The premise - modern gal with live-in boyfriend and anti-marriage philosophy attends many weddings - seems intriguing enough. There's quite a lot of room there for social commentary on the nature of marriage and why we remain optimistic about it despite the cautionary statistics. Darcy Cosper fails to explore this premise, and her characters, fully.

The dialogue borders on painful: Cosper attempts to make her characters smart, witty, and over-educated. It ends up sounding... lame. The main character's boyfriend asks her to dance: "Foxtrot?" Joy's reply: "Gesundheit." And it's downhill from that opening gambit.

The poor dialogue would be forgiveable if not for the rest of the text. The torturous sentences drag on too long and wind back on themselves. This sort of storytelling is amusing when done in person. In print, it's a pain in the nether regions.

Throughout the 'summer of discontent' Joy manages to remain unsympathetic. The author reiterates Joy's anti-marriage stance early and often, but fails to explore the topic in any depth until the very end, when two characters magically explain its origin to her. But not to the reader: somehow Joy picks up the gist of what her best friend and brother have told her, though I couldn't reach the same conclusion based on those conversations.

The book ends on a rather baffling note. While I'm glad the end is more complex than "happily ever after", Joy's choices still hang suspended from extremely thin plot points.

In the end, I felt like the book needed to go back to the author a few more times for revisions.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Tis The Season..., April 11, 2004

By 

Brittany Rose (Winnipeg, MB) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wedding Season (Paperback)

The thing that struck me about this book as I finished it wasn't the character development (for I found most of the characters too closed off), or the 'gripping' plot (it isn't particularly chaotic despite the books premise)...but what I took away from it. I found as I read the story that it really gives you some perspective on the institutions and conventions in our society, particularly (and obviously) surrounding Marriage and Weddings. I was drawn into the ideas of why some people cherish 'til death do us part' and why others, such as the main character, are so opposed (or maybe not) to weddings.

The story has the general premise of Joy Silverman, a 29-going on-30 year old woman with a perfect live-in boyfriend, who is faced with the dilemma of attending 17 weddings in 6 months, including her 5 nearest and dearest pals, both of her parents, friends of friends and friends of the family...you might assume, judging by the cover (a big no no) and the intial outline of hte story on the back and the catch phrase at the beginning, that you will be catapaulted into detailed accounts of the most important of these weddings...

Instead, Cosper uses the events that take place at the weddings to bring her anti-marriage heroine Joy to question her morals and beliefs in terms of why she is so against marraige, when all of these other people in her life are committing to one another. I think the story concept is original in itself as you are reading about someone who goes against hte conventions of both what we expect in society (marriage!) and what we expect from a 'romantic comedy-bridget jones-esque' type book that dominates the market these days for women (this book is hardly a romantic comedy...whatsoever). The only thing I found discouraging about the story was that there was a large number of characters and sub-plots introduced that never really went anywhere or contributed to the main messages of the novel, and serve mainly as confusing backdrop storylines that don't contribute to a more cohesive and concise book.

Regardless of the criticisms and congratulations I have to offer to Miss Cosper, I have to say that this book, while not the most enthralling of the ones I have read lately, was definiately one of the most unique and promising in terms of what you have to gain from reading it. Single and married women alike should not go into this story and expect a super dramatic romance and climax and all that jazz that you find in most books on the market, but should rather read this book for the experience and the values you will pick up when you are done.

26 of 34 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Joyless, October 18, 2004

By 

E. A Solinas "ea_solinas" (MD USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Wedding Season (Paperback)

"Wedding Season" aspires to be the intellectual version of chick-lit, but comes across as pretentious and preachy. Name-dropping everyone from Julian Barnes to Anais Nin, Darcy Cosper's debut novel ends up an empty, bitter-tasting mess.

Joy is fiercely anti-marriage, but somehow has gotten roped into being a bridesmaid/guest at seventeen weddings in six months: A debutante wedding, two gay commitment ceremonies, a Web-based wedding for an open marriage, and weddings for her brother, mother, and father.

Then Joy's boyfriend Gabe drops a bombshell -- he wants to marry her. Without really thinking about it, she accepts. But she also has to deal with her lesbian friend Henry's possible breakup, her pal Joan's breakdown, and the possibility of her boyfriend cheating on her with a sexy, sly memoirist. Does Joy really want to get married after all?

It's easy to see "Wedding Season" as a novel about how some people are happiest when unmarried, and how singleness is not a disease. Sure, happiness can't be bought in a little velvet box. But dig a little deeper into the book's message. How independent can a woman be if her determination to remain unmarried is based in a bunch of childhood neuroses and fears? Not very inspiring.

Cosper's writing isn't anything to write home about. Her thin plot is worth about twenty pages, so she stretches it out with the seventeen weddings -- several of which are glossed over -- and a dozen subplots. But half the subplots lead nowhere, and the main plot itself putters to an unsatisfying halt.

Despite being called a "comedy of manners," there's nothing remotely witty or intelligent in this story. The author apparently harbors some bitterness towards marriage, and therefore trots out many arguments against it. So it's not witty, not intelligent -- it's merely a preachy tract, wrapped inside quirky anecdotes about chaotic weddings.

Joy herself is a wretched character -- stodgy, peevish, and neurotic. Worse, Cosper has her acknowledge her neuroses, but not overcome them -- at the end, she's as messed-up and fearful as ever, and has treated her long-suffering boyfriend like a doormat to boot. Other characters like the gay brother, the good girl, the neurotic mom and gorgeous boyfriend are merely cardboard cutouts. The only likable character is lesbian pal Henry; despite her over-the-top personality, she's the sanest person in the whole book.

The neurotic bitterness and preachiness of "Wedding Season" spoil what could have been a fun light romp. Despite the back-cover comparison to Jane Austen, there's no comedy and no manners in this flaccid piece of chick-lit.