The Wedding

Title: The Wedding
Author: Nicholas Sparks

"Sparks knows how to tug at the reader's heartstring"
-Chicago Sun-Times

"Excellent.. After reading this book you really will want to convey your feelings to someone you care about before its too late!"
-BestsellersWorld.com

"Sure to leave you breathless.. In this stunning follow-up to The Notebook, readers new and old will remember the joy of falling in love and the challenges of staying in love"
-RoundTableReviews.com

"The Wedding left me with a smile on my face. The ending suprised me, and left my heart aflutter. this is a book that will forever have a spot on my bookshelf"
-TheRomanceReadersConnection.com

Haha.. okay, enough about the reviews from 'outside'! I orignally wanted to put down only three reviews but the last one surely hit the spot for me, so I was 'obliged' to throw in that one too.. :-) What can I say, the story really DID leave a smile on my face that continued till I fell asleep that night, in fact, I'm positively sure I slept smiling <-- okay, this might be a bit exaggerating!

I've never really been interested in Sparks books as I find the movies (A Walk to Remember and The Notebook) quite ordinary, though pleasantly sweet. But I guess I forgot one thing, those story are realistic stories that could happen to anyone. I mean, most big-named authors write love stories for the wealthy; tycoons, earls, dukes.. okay la, at least ONE half of the couple must be indecently rich while the other one might be a bit poor or misfortunate or something! As if ordinary people, like you and me, don't really experience romantic love.

Well, back to Sparks! A Walk to Remember caught my eye one day at a book store, and the book-addict in me wanted to add it to my collection. However, the avid-reader me found this book quite different from the movie. Not really vastly different, but the book made the movie seem so much more real and I really understood the movie after that. If at first I thought it was just pleasantly sweet, after reading the book, I realized it was really wonderful <-- poor choice of words here!

I wanted to sample his other works too, so when I came across his books at a book fair, I immediately sat down to chose between a wide range of titles he had written. At first, I wanted to buy The Notebook since I already seen the movie and found it quite touching. On second thought, I already knew the story was beautiful, though quite slow for my liking in the movie. So I decided to try another book and came across The Wedding. With such a simple title, I was suprised to read the reviews, though as all of us know, reviews CAN be misleading!

It took a long time for me to start reading this book, what with my thesis and piling work but a few days ago, I managed to get hold of this book and start reading it. And to tell you the truth, I didn't want to put it down!

Its a story of old folks love really. About a man, Wilson, who was suddenly afraid that his wife, Jane, had fallen out of love with him, after 30 years of marriage, when he was still as much in love with her as the day the took her as his wife. The starting point was when he forgot their 29th anniversary. Since he had never been the romantic one (they even got married at the registrars office je pun), he didn't really care at first, hoping that in buying an expensive piece of jewellery would make his wife forgive him. But a few days later, he realized how hurt his wife had really felt and this made him vow to give her the best 30th anniversary ever.

In his plan, he includes all their children who were suprised at the change in their father, his father in law (Noah in The Notebook) and their mutual friends as well as their extended family. He even took a week off to make sure he was at home on their anniversary. However, a week before their anniversary, their daughter came home with news that she was getting married and she had planned to get hitched on her parents wedding anniversary. (And I thought THE WEDDING was for the old folks when I first read the synopsis, which turned out to be someone elses.. or so I thought.. hmmmmm..)

After that came a whirlwind of activities to get ready for the wedding though clearly, Jane was the most excited since she wanted her daughter to have a much better wedding than she had. And she made it clear to Wilson that a wedding is a day a woman would one day look back and wants to be happy about it. She doesn't want her daughter to regret the day of her marriage. It goes without saying of how much Jane felt her wedding day wasn't what she had dreamt of.

Anyway, the story is alternated between the preparations of the wedding, to Wilson's talks with his father-in-law (which I really liked) and about him reminiscing the days he and Jane first met and how their relationship blossomed!

I stayed up till 2.30am reading this book and when I finally turned the last page, my face had this dreamy look on it with a smile that didn't seem to want to go away! I never expected this book to have this effect on me, but it did.. and I'm glad to have a dose of a love story for us ordinary people!