Clearing the Aisle Book

They're getting hitched.

When Rachel Silverstein and her longtime boyfriend Dan Gershon decide to get engaged, they hardly expect that planning a wedding will be more difficult than any life changes they've braved in the five years they've been dating. After all, they already live together. But suddenly everyone from parents to friends to cousins to caterers seems to be losing their minds completely. Surely it can't all be in Rachel's head. Can it?

She's going insane.

Between her budget-crazed father, her flighty mother, her stepmother, her seemingly perfectly well-meaning in-laws, and a fiancé who's suddenly questioning the very institution of marriage, Rachel's barely holding it together. If the guest-list wars and menu battles don't kill her, the dress-shopping will. And what's it going to take for Dan to step up and realize that his beloved future bride needs his help coping with the madness if she's ever going to make it to the altar?

Publishers Weekly

For 20-something Rachel Silverstein, finding the right guy to marry was the easy part-she'd known her now-fiance, whom she met during her freshman year in college, for about two minutes before she started referring to him as "the love of my life Dan Gershon." Luckily, Dan returned the affection-but now they have to plan the wedding to prove it, as Rachel's motley crew of family and friends weigh in on an event that is quickly spinning out of control. A writer for a popular young adult novel series, Rachel is living the dream-sort of-of making a living through her craft while enjoying plenty of time to explore her beloved adopted city of New York. But her skinflint father and social-climbing stepmother are issuing sign-and-return ultimatums to her semi-estranged mother, the poster child for borderline personality disorder. Meanwhile, Dan's parents, apparently still mired in the 1950s, blissfully plan a breadwinner-father-stay-at-home-mother existence for the happy couple. Bridesmaid Naomi wants an edgy, experimental dress, and voice-of-reason Aunt Natalie is overcome by familial forces and retreats to the background to dispense martinis and offer a shoulder to cry on. What's a girl to do? Wry observations of young New York life from a bagels-and-lox-at-Barney-Greengrass perspective instead of a Manolos-and-Cosmos-at-Balthazar angle are refreshing, and the hints of Jewish life in New York are atmospheric and charming. Schwartz, a columnist for the New York Sun, offers a pleasant and witty, if somewhat familiar, tale of wedding woes. Agent, David McCormick. (May) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.