Summer Reading

The holiday weekend is here and you're doing the stay-cation thing. Where can you go to escape the kids who cry boredom? Maybe you're luckier and you've got a long weekend booked at a summer cottage in the North Woods, where the days are long and lazy and you'll be crying boredom before long.

Take along a copy of Sophie Kinsella's new novel and get away from it all.

Having made her name with the Shopaholic series, Ms. Kinsella uses the pseudonym "Madeleine Wickham" for non-shopping tales and that's the case in The Wedding Girl.

The story opens with Milly agreeing to marry a gay man so that he won't be deported and separated from his lover. You just know, when you get to the second chapter, that this wedding of convenience is going to spell trouble for her impending marriage to a very eligible, wealthy bachelor.

Milly's fiance is a pure cartoon, battling it out with his father for independence, but when it's hot outside you don't want deep character development. It's tried and true, easy on the mind, and nothing more than entertainment.

Proper chick-lit needs more complexity in the main character's life, and Ms. Kinsella doesn't disappoint. Milly's sister is unmarried and pregnant, and Milly's parents are coming apart. Mummy is obsessed with the wedding, and Dad is feeling left out, and you've probably heard it a million times but it's always fun when handled with the subtle humor that Sophie Kinsella brings to her novels.

With all the wedding prep filling out the backdrop, Milly must find her pseudo-spouse to obtain a divorce, she has to reconcile with her fiance who's stormed off upon learning that she married someone before, and she will uncover the traitor in her camp who ratted her out to the minister just as she was about to commit bigamy.

There's plot solutions that you can see coming from a mile away, but who wants to puzzle over anything when the sun is shining and the hubby's toiling away at the barbecue grill.

Empty-headed it may be, but The Wedding Girl is a cold drink on a hot July day when your brain is over-heated from work and life's ordinary responsibilities.

Can't get away for the weekend? Escape to Madeleine Wickham's England and the requisite happy ending of The Wedding Girl. You'll be glad you made the trip.