Links: Goodreads | Amazon UK
Blurb: Will your past always catch up with you?
Tessa Dannall is excited and happy when her daughter, Nia, arrives at their family’s tropical beach resort to get married.
Tessa is also trying to forget the last time she went to a wedding on this beach and how that day changed her life for ever.
But as the big day draws near, Tessa realises she must face the deadly ghosts from her past – or they may ruin her daughter’s future…
Review: The Beach Wedding by Dorothy Koomson is another one of the Quick Reads books I was sent in January. In case you didn’t hear me talking about them in the last review, Quick Reads says that their books are ideal for busy people who may want to up their reading game in the New Year and also for less confident adult readers. Which again, I think is a fab idea that they’re targeting a large market with their books. Anyway, I was keen to review The Beach Wedding because I’m a huge Dorothy Koomson fan and have been for a good many years now and was intrigued to see how her writing would adapt in a short story, as opposed to the deep, rich and detailed full length novels she normally writes.
It took me a little while to get into this book (I say a little while, like 20 pages or so) but it definitely takes off a little while in and once that hit, I couldn’t put it down and finished it in more or less one sitting. The Beach Wedding is a short story about Nia and Marvin who are due to get married at Nia’s mother’s family’s beach resort in Ghana. The same place where her father died on his and her mum’s wedding day. Tessa, Nia’s mother is apprehensive about the wedding and the memories and heartache it might bring up but when Marvin’s parents turn up at the resort, everything gets turned on it’s head.
For Women’s Fiction fans, this would be a perfect read to up your Goodreads goal or something to tuck in to on a morning commute. Plus, the book is super light-weight so it won’t cause any extra heaviness in your bag! Win win. I love Dorothy Koomson’s writing and characters and she defintiely didn’t disappoint with this one although because it’s a short story, everything is diluted down a little bit. I would have absolutely loved to have read this story as a full length novel. It would have worked so, so well with the setting, a beach resort in Ghana, the variety of characters and personalities and also a rich past between Tessa, Drew (her husband-to-be who died), Jake, Nia and Marvin.
There was brief mention of perhaps some mental abuse between Tessa and Drew’s relationship when they were in their 20’s and I think this could have opened up a fantastic dialogue and awareness in that topic, had there been more space and time to delve into it, which of course there wasn’t in so little pages. However, in such a short story, it really packs a punch. There’s a lot of tension, drama, twists and turns that I wouldn’t have expected! If anything, this book has just made me want to pick up another Dorothy Koomson novel next!
