HQN, $6.99, ISBN 0-373-77127-4
Contemporary Romance, 2006
Your enjoyment of Everything’s Coming up Rosie hinges on one thing: how much you can take the heroine Rosie Sullivan Kilgannon because she doesn’t shut up. Whenever she speaks, her conversations end up being long paragraphs and she also has a tendency to babble off-topic. In fact, this book has me thinking of it as some long-lost episode of The Gilmore Girls because Rosie can babble your ears off just like Lorelei Gilmore. Kasey Michaels doesn’t have Amy Sherman-Palladino’s timing and rhythm, however, so don’t expect charming and quaint pop culture references from Rosie. She just… babbles.
The hero Doug Llewellyn is a commitment-shy playboy who, turning 40, is starting to get that itchy feeling women would love to imagine men are capable of feeling – he is starting to tire of playing the field, although he’s not committed to finding the right woman and settling down with her yet. He is invited by his cousin Bettie to her daughter Lili-beth’s wedding and he’s on his guard, knowing full well that Bettie loves to play the role of procuress and matchmaker. He encounters Lili-beth’s web-design course instructor Rosie during the wedding however and sparks fly between them even as everything you can imagine to go wrong with wedding preparations take place in this story.
Rosie is a very central feature of this story so if you cannot stand her, you won’t have an easy time with the rest of the story as she’s a Mary Poppins-like fix-it-all character here. Not much is known of her but in this story she is, at the last count, a wedding co-planner, a Web designer, a teacher, and a relationship expert. She also knows everybody and has a hand in fixing everything in this story for the better, and Doug is just one of her many awe-struck subjects in this story.
I have no problems with Rosie myself, in fact I find her often amusing and most likable. She’s a character in every sense of the word – she’s created by the author to steal scenes and charm hearts. Rosie meddles, offers unwanted advice, and works her magic on all the good guys in the story. If Rosie is Lorelei, Doug reminds me a little of Christopher. At the very least, at least he’s humorous and not a stereotypical self-pitying boor like Luke. He and Rosie have enough sparks to make their very quick attraction plausible.
Nothing is really surprising in this story as most of the twists can be seen coming from a mile away, but Ms Michaels manages to put everything together nicely. From the over-the-top slapstick antics to the Bridezilla drama, Everything’s Coming up Rosie ends up being a most entertaining comedy. It doesn’t have that extra edge to be a keeper where I’m concerned, but it is an enjoyable story nonetheless.
