Four Weddings and a Sixpence is super comforting. It’s a collection of four novellas, all Regency romances, all remarkably angst-free. Five minutes after reading each story I had already forgotten all about it, but I remembered my enjoyment while reading it.

The novellas are held together by a framing story written by Julia Quinn. In 1817, four girls who are attending Madame Rochambeaux’s Gentle School for Girls find a sixpence in the mattress. The girls (Bea, Cordelia, Ellie, and Anne) decide to keep it for good luck when they recall the rhyme “Something borrowed, something blue, something old, and something new, and a sixpence in her shoe.” This sixpence, they decide, will bring each of them a husband. Since Anne has to marry before she turns twenty-one, she gets to use it first, with the stipulation that if she does get married, she will pass the sixpence to Cordelia who will pass it on to Ellie who will pass it on to the intensely skeptical Bea.

This brings us to the first novella, Something New, by Stefanie Sloan. Anne has to marry by the age of twenty-one or else be sent to live in the country by her eccentric relatives. She’s desperate but also picky, hoping to find a husband who will let her have some independence. When she meets the well-known rake Rhys Alexander Hamilton, Duke of Dorset, she immediately realizes that he would make a terrible husband, and Rhys agrees. However, Rhys points out that he knows all about the local eligible men, and he promises to find Anne a suitable mate. As Rhys grows more attracted to Anne, he becomes increasingly picky about whom she should choose. Meanwhile Anne has her own reasons to desperately want to avoid falling in love, but fall in love she does because this is a romance and Rhys is super hot.

This novella was pure comfort food, like the froth on the top of a really good latte. The reader never experiences a single moment of anxiety about this couple. We all know exactly how things will proceed – at least we do if we’ve ever read a book or seen a movie before in our lives. But it’s well-written froth, funny and sweet. It has characters that are enjoyable to spend time with. It has good, if alarmingly rapid, character development, and back-stories that allowed the characters’ various hang-ups make sense. I enjoyed it enormously.

Anne passes the sixpence to Cordelia, the heroine of Something Borrowed by Elizabeth Boyle. This is a madcap comedy, extremely silly and rather fun. In order to get her family to stop nagging her about marriage, Cordelia invents a fiancé. Then she has to go to Anne’s wedding and she’s expected to bring the fiancé. So she asks a childhood friend, Kip, to pretend to be said fiancé, though he has an almost-fiancée of his own. After a mercifully brief episode of mistaken identity, Cordelia is off to the wedding with Kip, as well as Kip’s mischievous brother Drew. Hijinks ensue. The novella is adorable although I did not believe a moment of it, and I also did not like the way Kip’s almost-but-not-quite-fiancée is portrayed. The streak of meanness with which the social climber Pamela is treated is classist and out of step with the rest of the collection. I want to see Pamela get her own story and I hope it involves kicking the asses of everyone she meets.

Cordelia gives the sixpence to Ellie, who is the heroine of my least favorite story, Something Blue by Laura Lee Guhrke. Ellie, AKA Lady Elinor, was once madly in love with Lawrence Blackthorne. But Lawrence accused her father of deliberately selling inadequate weapons to the military, and Lawrence and Ellie broke up when she believed her father instead of him. Lawrence steals the sixpence and Elle tries a variety of things to get it back, as the case against her father grows.

Frankly, I found this story to be irritating. Perhaps it’s a matter of personal preference regarding plot, but I thought that Lawrence was a petty jerk about the sixpence. Moreover, I thought that Lawrence was incredibly unreasonable in asking Ellie to side with him and not her father when Lawrence refused to show her any proof. Then when Ellie does side with Lawrence, she’s upset about her father but not as devastated as one might expect. Too much happens too quickly for the character development on her part to make sense – and it’s all on her part.

Anyway, Ellie marries Lawrence, who returns the sixpence, and gives it to Beatrice, in Julia Quinn’s And a Sixpence in her Shoe.

CATNIP ALERT.

Bea loves books, knitting, and astronomy. Frederick is blind in one eye due to a terrible accident and studies theoretical physics. Bea’s maiden aunties at one point go so far as to actually fake swooning to get these two together. There’s a lot of food, there’s frank discussion of disability and of looking different, and on their big date Frederick takes Bea to the local university telescope, which she has never been able to use before because of institutionalized sexism. So, yeah, I adored this novella in the most ridiculous way.

Now, if these elements are not your catnip, then you might be more prone to note that one week is not necessarily an appropriate length of time to know someone before you propose. You might also note that the character development careens along at an unlikely pace. But Bea and Frederick are well matched for each other in a way that none of the other couples are. They are clearly going to be deliriously happy eating scones and taking care of Bea’s meddling aunties and talking about science. Frankly, I’m surprised they didn’t get hitched on the very first day. Their story is the most believable of the set, partly because they don’t have to make huge changes in order to fall in love – they just have to get to know one another.

All in all, I give this collection a B- with the caveat that your enjoyment of it will depend on your mood and your catnip. Because the stories are all short, they don’t get much time for things to develop. The plots are all somewhat implausible and the stories lack the kind of emotional weight that make then stick in the mind.

However, the stories are also sweet, funny, and heartfelt. Their very shortness and lightness make them perfect for a stressful time (like, oh say, the end of December, when I personally tend to lose my mind in a pile of discarded wrapping paper). Also, the friendship between the women is delightful. I would happily have read a book about the girls going to boarding school, without the adult romances.