This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by Syaffolee. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Romance Novella category.
The summary:
Emmy Mathis is sure of three things:
1. Her sister Margery’s three-week wedding extravaganza at their grandmother’s Marietta, Montana home will be over-the-top ridiculous.
2. She’d much prefer to stay home in Atlanta in a pair of sweats.
3. And she absolutely, positively, won’t feel even a hint of a spark for Griffin Hyatt, grandson of her beloved grandmother’s best friend and the architect of the most embarrassing night of her life ten years ago.
But Emmy is dead wrong about number three. The moment she and Griffin lock eyes again, the passion that’s always smoldered between them flames. And they aren’t kids any more, so why should they deny the desire that sears through them both?
Is this no more than a wedding fling between two people with too much chemistry and an overload of history, or can Emmy try to build a new life from the ashes of their past? And if Griffin is truly really free of his fiance, why is he a finalist in the town’s Wedding Giveaway? Emmy can’t answer those questions, but she does know that Griffin has the power to burn her like no one else.
Still, how can Emmy walk away from the one man she’s always loved now that she knows what she’s been missing?
Here is Syaffolee's review:
“A Game of Brides” started out in a promising way with its vivid prose. Emmy Mathis is in shock after meeting Griffin Hyatt, her childhood crush, again while traveling to her sister’s wedding to be her maid of honor. The strongest selling point with this novella is the writing. I’ve lived in Montana, but I was pretty amused that Crane’s descriptive rendering paints the place as some kind of alternate universe paradise. But as the story wore on and Emmy and Griffin worked through their history and toward a happy ending, something began to sit not quite right with me. There’s a disconnect between what the story’s tropes try to lead the reader to conclude and what the characters’ actions and motivations may lead to logically.
In a short format like the novella, I appreciated that the author kept a tight focus on the main characters in the first part of the story. There’s a lot of emotional grist between Emmy and Griffin, especially with their shared history, and I think the novella could have been a really good one if this was kept up and built upon. However, I felt that the tension between Emmy and Griffin was characterized more by lust than love. What could have been romantic tension was dispersed in favor of other conflict when the secondary characters started butting in–especially when Griffin’s grandmother tells him point blank that he needs to start controlling his own life instead of letting things happen to him.
From that point forward, the story really tries to sell the theme that happiness will come if you do what you want and control your own life instead of being a passive bystander. But that theme is never truly realized. It only appears that Griffin and Emmy takes control of their lives when, in fact, things just keep happening to them which force their hand. Griffin doesn’t preemptively contact his ex-fiance and former best friend to try to iron things out. His ex-fiance has to come to him first. Emmy doesn’t actively do anything to try to get out of her horrible job until she reads her emails and finds out her boss has done something which forces her to finally act.
The main problem that Emmy and Griffin have is not controlling their lives but lack of communication. They should have learned from their mistakes during their teen years that a lot of the ten year long angst could have been eliminated if they talked to each other. Oh, sure, they talked to each other about their dreams for their professional lives, but that’s not the same thing as trying to communicate about the current state of their relationship. A lot of the conflict towards the end where Emmy keeps thinking that Griffin went back to his ex-fiancee could have been resolved with some sort of communication. But no, he doesn’t communicate anything to Emmy, which is really frustrating because it indicates he hasn’t learned the important thing at all. On the other hand, Emmy didn’t try to contact him either, thinking it would paint her as too needy. To me, if two adults are going to try to make a relationship work, they have to talk to each other regardless of how “silly” it might seem. And if they don’t, it’s not going to last.
Another thing I found interesting, though, is aside from Griffin, the story is dominated by female characters who are not entirely likeable. The other male characters are either mostly absent or rendered as wallpaper. I haven’t read or seen George R. R. Martin’s “A Game of Thrones,” but I assume the title “A Game of Brides” is a play on that. But while “A Game of Thrones” might be a fight for a throne, “A Game of Brides” is not about fighting for a bride. It’s about the “brides” or female characters fighting among themselves for supremacy. There’s the jockeying between Emmy and Griffin’s ex-fiancee for Griffin’s attention, the sibling rivalry between Emmy and her bridezilla sister, Emmy’s contentious relationship with her awful female boss, and the meddling grandmothers trying to mastermind everyone else’s love lives. It’s a depressing theme and it tells us that we shouldn’t expect support from a sisterhood. We should just expect a lot of backstabbing.
Readers who like rather spicy second chance stories and don’t want to look too much past that would probably like this novella. I will say that I really enjoyed Crane’s writing style and wouldn’t mind reading something else of hers. Unfortunately, this story does not work for me as a romance novella. There’s too much thematically going on in the second half. And as for the main characters, I might believe in a happily for now rather than the happily ever after implied at the end. But as it stands, I don’t believe they’re going to get that happily ever after until they worked on a lot of other things first.
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This book was part of a Bride series, too. I never thought of it as erotica. To be up front and honest, I have reviewed this book on many sites–I liked it. I am a regular subscriber to SBTB.