Vesna's Reviews > The Guest List

The bride ‧ The plus one ‧ The best man ‧ The wedding planner ‧ The bridesmaid ‧ The body

Welcome to the f*cked-up-wedding-of-the-year!



I find myself turning the last page of this INSANE book and smiling 🙂
I liked it; I liked it very much, actually.

From the very beginning Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, strongly echoed through the story.
On a desolate island off the Irish coast, long thought to be haunted, a handful of carefully picked guests are about to attend the wedding of the year.
The Island, with its blood-chilling history, the bog, the cliffs and decaying graveyard appears itself as an angry character ready to settle old scores. I was really impressed how efficiently Lucy Foley set the atmosphere of hidden malice where anything could have happen.
The other book whose influence was clearly visible was, unfortunately, my old nemessis Lord of the Flies
I mean, come on! There is a limited number of times you can say, oh well, boy will be boys or that's boys for you before you want to grab one of the boys and smash his head into a rock! And then repeat the same with the next "boy" in line.

There's no point of going into the plot. Everything was said in the blurb. We have a wedding, bride and groom, the best man, bridesmade, ushers, the plus one, the wedding planner and the body.
It's a "who did it and why" kind of a situation.
And although I see and agree with the main con mentioned in many reviews - the predictably of the plot, it didn't diminish my reading experience. I would say just the opposite. Yes, I did easily predict the final fall out. But not completely. Foley has managed to weave many layers into the plot and then nicely wrap up all of the lose ends. There was always something else to discover.
Layer and layers of guilt and lies and old sins just kept resurficing all over.
So, in the end I ended up smiling with the sence of satisfaction that most of the awful characters of this story finally got what was coming to them.

Will definitely check out other books by Lucy Foley.