As AO3 is down, I needed a quick hit of romance cray-cray so I thought I would turn to an old and trusted author, Lynne Graham. As usual, there are spoilers, if Happily Ever After for a Mills & Boon novel can even be considered a spoiler.

Lynne Graham’s Unveiling the Wrong Bride

The Blurb: Empty vows…explosive marriage bed!

Billionaire Tore Renzetti already considered his convenient wedding a farce, before he realised the wrong bride was at the altar! To honour his grandfather, Tore continues with the ceremony, furiously branding his new wife — who he knows just wants his fortune — with a fiery ceremonial kiss…

Bakery owner Violet would do anything to fund her mother’s life-saving treatment. Even standing in for her sister as Tore’s bride! Violet is bound to the Italian for three, passionless years, until that one kiss tempts her to renegotiate their marriage contract…

The title conveys the Wrong! Bride! trope, and this book has all the hallmarks of a classic Lynne Graham novel:

• Twin sisters!
• Marriage of Convenience!
• Blindsided gazillionaire groom!
• The wrong bride twin turns up!
• Secret bebbies!
• Angry Mediterranean man!
• All women are money-grubbing whores!
• But this one is an angel!
• But I can’t let her know!
• Weirdly (not) a virgin!
• Oh dear she is divine!
• She must never know I love her!
• She has a heart of gold!
• She knows how to manage my family!
• She only agreed to the fake marriage to pay for her mother’s cancer treatment!
• Money can’t buy me love!
• He swoons!
• She swoons!
• And then they fell in love!
• And live happily ever after.

Ultimately, the book does not deliver. Though Tore and Violet hate each other from the start due to Violet and her sister Tabitha having a last minute (fraternal) twin swapperoo on the wedding day. Understandably, Tore who is coerced (and obligated to his grandparents) to marry their chosen bride for him is apoplectic. This should have allowed for a lot more anger and a lot more heated discussions. However, no-one in this novel gets dragged. The hate is too weak. Everyone was too conciliatory, too kind, too understanding, and even the sense of evil flirty cousin causing jealousies didn’t resonate. Sadly, this story lacked the full punch of absurdity I expect from Lynne Graham, such as we saw in earlier classics such as The Sicilian’s Stolen Son and The Greek’s Chosen Son. There just was not enough revenge and anger resolution to satisfy my melodrama needs.

I also feel that when absurdity is not absurd enough, the sense of reality does not allow for the suspension of disbelief, as it is too grounded and much too close to our world. There is a devastating story about one of my father’s relatives who found himself at the altar marrying the wrong sister, and not the woman whose hand in marriage he had requested. He had approached his eventual father-in-law for a traditional proxy where the bride did not date him or even speak to him before the wedding. The father-in-law deliberately misunderstood which daughter the prospective groom had asked to marry. He was just a young man who had no family present to support him as it was wartime and he was separated from them and far from his home. He had no idea about the detailed information exchange required in a proxy marriage. He was forced to go through a wedding that he had not agreed upon.

I am devastated for the 22 year old with no father, no mother, and no-one to stand up for his interests. I am also devastated for the woman whose father used her to blindside the groom who raged against his marriage for the rest of his life. When he died, his sons told my dad that at least now their mother will get some peace.

Fiction tropes don’t occur in a void. Coerced marriages are not unheard of and nor are they romantic. They destroy lives. Truth is stranger and much more devastating than fiction.

Perhaps I was never going to enjoy this story.

Metadata

My Metadata: absurdist romance, alphabrute, arranged marriage, babies, bat-shit-crazy, castle, category, countryside, dancing, fake name trickery, fake wedding, family dynamics, gazillionaire, grandparents, italian, marriage-of-convenience, martyrdom-for-family, mills-and-boon, misery guts, romance, sex, veddy english, wedding.

Library Metadata: I have searched both local and national libraries across Australia, the USA and the UK and cannot find a library record associated with this book which contains any subject heading descriptors.

Sloppy.