The Wedding Gift, by Kathleen McKenna

To be honest, I was pulled in by the book cover.  It's haunting and spooky, and with the premise of a young bride in Oklahoma being given a stately mansion by her rich and snobby in-laws as a wedding gift, the site of a mass murder thirty-some years before, it was right up my alley.  Sadly, I just couldn't get into this book at all, and for one very specific reason.

Quick overview:  The first few pages were extracts from the news about a mass murder of an entire family (father, mother, children) which happened in 1975 in the Willet home, and the horrible crime was committed by the mother.  Another news excerpt identified that two boys in 1986, had gone to the now-abandoned home, and for whatever reason, ended up in the empty pool, falling from the tree branches above. One boy broke both his legs.  The other boy died.  The boy who survived never spoke about what happened.

Fast forward to today.  Leann is a seventeen-year-old girl, and the self-proclaimed "prettiest girl in Dalton, Oklahoma."  She's getting married to George Willet, whose family is the richest in town and owns the house that everything happened in -- and her brother was the boy who had died back in 1986.  Not the easiest of situations to be in.

What an intriguing and spooky idea.  I was excited to begin reading this, but within the first few pages I was struggling. Although a quick read, the book is told from Leann's perspective. The issue that I had with it is that not just the dialogue, but the narrative itself, is written in a very casual voice, which is fine except that one may consider it to be a very stereotypical Southern-style voice and dialect.  And not just through conversations, but throughout the entire book. Which, while I enjoy reading books set in that region, or reading character dialogue that is structured that way, I found it increasingly difficult to read a book in which every sentence is structured in this manner.  And one thing I couldn't figure out - I wasn't sure why every time a character spoke, their dialogue was always in italics?

Here's an example of the narrative:

Daddy says that they is arranged that way so's the Willets' men can keel over on the golf course and be buried two yards away in sight of the greens, and also so "that those cheap bastards only have to employ one poor groundskeeper for everything."  (p.23)

There is a ghost story underneath it all, and there is quite a bit of humor.  Unfortunately, I just don't think I was the right audience for this.  I would have preferred the casual tone to be strictly in the characters' conversations, rather than in the narrative, in order to be able to enjoy the overall humor in the book, and especially the ghost story.

I want to thank Crazy Book Tours for giving me the opportunity to read this book.  In no way do I want to diminish any attempt for the uniquely told story or to hurt anyone's feelings -- this is my opinion only, and I know that there are others out there who will prefer this writing style much more.

Happy Reading,
Coffee and a Book Chick