One would expect a seven-months-pregnant bride might be the most flagrant no-no at the wedding joining two upscale East Coast families, but shenanigans spill forth like lobsters from their pots in Maggie Shipstead's Seating Arrangements.
In this debut novel, the details fall to good-humored and stoic Biddy Van Meter, mother of the bride. Winn, the father of the bride, arrives at his island summer home to be outnumbered by women seven-to-one ("Makeup pencils and brushes were everywhere, abandoned helter-skelter as though by the fleeing beauticians of Pompeii") with a premonition the weekend will become "a treacherous puzzle, full of opportunities for the wrong thing to be said or done."
Winn fulfills his own prophecy. Lurking among the flock of bridesmaids is Agatha, who earnestly continues an earlier flirtation with Winn, while he indulges his brooding analysis of a longstanding social snub by the local golf club. Meanwhile, Livia, the sister of the bride, mourns her recent break-up with the son of another island family. Add Aunt Cecelia the martini mixer, Sterling the rapscallion groomsman and an assortment of other sassy, smarmy and sometimes sympathetic characters who'd fit in perfectly in a Richard Russo or Elinor Lipman novel, and the liaisons, near-trysts and romantic memories abound.
Send your regrets to any summer invitations and stay in with Maggie Shipstead's entertaining novel, a guaranteed good time. --Cheryl Krocker McKeon, bookseller