Lois 's Reviews > The Good Bride

Ruth and Teo are having the wedding of the year in a small coastal town in Florida that Ruth spent summers in growing up. Blue Compass is a haven for new money and the Bancroft family. This story is told by Ruth, Teo, Marcus (the town sheriff), and Marcus' daughter, Kayla, the local wedding planner. Ruth has 2 older sisters, a brother in law, twin niece & nephew, an obnoxious mother of the bride, and an estranged father. Teo's therapist mother is also featured in the story. One of Ruth's sisters is a popular social media influencer that adds its own layer of chaos to the mess. This story has struggles with class and race as well as the standard rich people being clueless and awful. Many of which are favorite thriller themes of mine. Yet the sum was less than the total of its parts somehow.

This is fast-paced and suffers from a few too many twists and story points. As a rule, I prefer when thrillers are told from multiple character viewpoints. However, in this novel, it just served to muddy the waters. There wasn't enough character building to make this method work in an audiobook, and I found myself needing to rewind in order to figure out who's pov I was listening to. This story has so much going on that it's difficult to keep all of the moving parts of the story straight. The reveals were uneventful, and I wasn't shocked or engrossed.

In many respects, it felt like the narrative overly relied on stereotypes of characters' role in life over the skillful building of characters that live with the reader. It made this story a bit hard to get into or care about. Usually, I finish thrillers in a single sitting, unable to move on until I know the reveals. In this case, my mind kept wandering because the story just didn't hold my attention.

This audiobook is narrated by Marni Penning. Marni does a great job using accents to distinguish between the revolving cast of point of view characters. The only complaint is that the accent was only used in sharing a sentence. It wasn't used during the narration of the pov character's thoughts or actions. This made it somewhat difficult to distinguish between characters until they were quoted.

Thank you to Jen Marie Wiggins, Dreamscape Media, and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to and review this audiobook. All opinions and viewpoints expressed in this review are my own.