Morgan Matson's books can be a bit hit and miss - The Unexpected Everything and Amy and Roger were pretty bland, but I really liked Since You've Been Gone and Second Chance Summer. This one, I really liked.
It was a really interesting look at family dynamics and what happens once the kids in a family grow up and move on to have their own lives, and what happens to the youngest kid (the MC, Charlie) when all of their siblings have moved on. It's also about the assumption some parents have that they kind of 'own' their children's lives. The Grant family is huge and close and Mrs Grant has found fame drawing a comic strip based on her children's lives, which is all good until they start wanting their privacy and for their lives to not be splashed across national newspapers.
So the lack of privacy brings tension, but not as much tension as the bonkers wedding that's due to take place. Charlie's sister is marrying her childhood sweetheart, which is lovely and everything, except that imagine everything that could possibly go wrong with the organisation of a wedding and then triple it and you're nearly there with how badly wrong one weekend can go.
Basically, Morgan Matson wrote a screenplay. I could totally see this book becoming a screwball comedy, Father Of The Bride style. It was very visual, but also fairly emotional. Charlie annoyed me a tiny bit because she just seemed to live inside this weird little bubble where she wanted to keep her family exactly as everything was when she was a little kid, but in all other respects there were some real feels in the story.
And just as an aside, what is Morgan Matson's obsession with giving her leading guy character an old-man name. Roger, Bill, Clark, Henry, Frank. Is this an American thing? These are old man names, right? I mean, Roger? That's my friend's dad's name and he's nearly seventy!
And the crossovers were a little bit odd. Characters from the author's other books make little cameos, but I never really liked any of her other characters enough to be constantly wondering what they did after the book ended. Their cameos felt shoehorned in and I think were there more to please the author than her readers.
Other than that, this was well worth a read. You kind of always know what you're getting with a Morgan Matson book - she knows what she's doing and she doesn't dick around with her formula. It was a decent read and I imagine I'll read her next book too.
3.5 stars