For Better, for Worse Book

After her marriage to Damien ended in disaster, Londoner Josie Flynn — thirtysomething and single again — is flying across the ocean to her American cousin's "big mistake" wedding. In her present "love stinks" frame of mind, the last person she expects to be seated next to on the flight is someone like Matt Jarvis. A recently divorced rock journalist, Matt is sensitive, good-looking, and remarkably attentive — and before their plane touches down, Josie's smitten. So how can she hope to convince her cousin to cut and run when Josie is all ready to leap into love again — with a stranger, no less, who might be just another Mr. Totally Wrong in Mr. Seductively Right's clothing?

The point is rendered moot, of course, once they deplane and she and Matt go their separate ways. After all, Josie's got prenuptial confabs to worry about and that dreaded lilac chiffon bridesmaid's dress to wear. But Dante himself couldn't have dreamed up the hell this wedding is proving to be — and when her dream hunk reappears and throws himself into the mix, Josie finds herself wondering how she — or any unattached modern woman, in fact — can hope to survive the new romantic rules of the twenty-first century.

Already a bestseller in the U.K., Carole Matthews's For Better, for Worse is a deliriously droll, dead-on tale of marriage, sex, monogamy, and modern love.

Publishers Weekly

Josephine Josie Flynn is a latter-day Bridget Jones, but without the cuteness, the sardonic humor or the wry introspection that made Ms. Jones so lovable (and her story so profitable). In this novel by bestselling English author Matthews, Josie is newly single and en route from London to her American cousin's wedding in New York, when she meets Matt Jarvis, an aspiring rock journalist who captures her attention and asks for a date as soon as their plane touches down. When they just miss each other at the appointed restaurant, madness ensues as Josie's ex-husband decides to jet to the wedding to win her back, and Matt becomes entangled with a publicist for a regrettable boy band, which covers the Beatles but doesn't even know who they were. There are moments of comedy and others of introspection in Matthews's book about the single life and how singletons strive to overcome their lot (often, it seems, by attending weddings, even ones to which they haven't been invited). Despite some humorous inventions (such as the Conversation Termination Sequence, an escape hatch from endless phone calls with her bodily functions$obsessed mother) and melancholy revelations ( somehow she was going to have to let the barriers down again, otherwise no one would ever get inside her protective shell to find the real Josie hiding there ), Matthews mostly fails to mine a deeper meaning from the characters and situations she creates as she entertains her readers with serendipitous trysts and near-misses. Still, Josie, unlike Bridget, never carps about her weight, and for that women readers can be thankful. (May) Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.