Boy meets girl. Boy proposes to girl. Boy and girl are celebrating engagement when girl’s aunt walks in on them. Chaos – and fun – ensues. Mother of the Bride is an amusing story about growing up, falling in love, and getting married. The twist is, it isn’t the bride who goes through all this. It isn’t even her mom.

Cydney Parrish has been a surrogate mother to her niece Bebe for more than fifteen years, ever since Cyd’s sister Gwen decided that her career as a jetsetting photographer was more important than raising her baby. Now Cyd’s got just two weeks to organize Bebe’s wedding. While she’s not thrilled at the prospect of nineteen-year-old Bebe and just-turned-twenty-one Aldo tying the knot, Cydney agrees to help them plan the event. But Aldo’s uncle Angus Munroe shows up on Cydney’s doorstep, prepared to do whatever it takes to stop the wedding. Cydney knows very little about Gus, a bestselling author and notorious recluse, but she’s about to find out a lot more about him – and herself – than she ever imagined.

After suffering various bodily injuries at the hands of the Parrish women, Gus draws up a Grand Plan to Wreck the Wedding, and is amazed when Cydney agrees to most of his outlandish proposals – disguised as helpful suggestions to Bebe and Aldo – until he realizes that going along to get along is Cydney’s way of life. He just knows there has to be a real woman hiding behind the façade of enabler, and a stolen kiss only ignites the attraction he feels for her. Gus sets about coming up with a way to stay in Cydney’s life, even as he remains unconvinced about the wisdom of letting “their” kids get married. Then the rest of the wacky Parrish family enters the picture, and things get really interesting – and hilarious.

Cydney and Gus face the same dilemma many parents do when their children grow up, Empty Nest Syndrome. Even though neither of them is the biological parent of the children in question, they’ve both raised these kids – Cydney after Gwen’s dumping Bebe on her doorstep, and Gus after his brother and sister-in-law died when Aldo was just four years old. Each of them realizes it, but Gus forces Cydney to confront and deal with her emotions. This aspect of the story not only serves to further the relationship between them, but it also adds an unexpected, and welcome, depth to the story.

I saw real change and growth in Cydney’s character, and thank goodness for that, because for the first half of the book she’s a real doormat, just letting people walk all over her, adjusting her life to suit everyone else’s convenience. It’s not until after she meets Gus and gets really, really angry with him that she begins to stand up for herself. Once she renounces her status as Universal Pushover, she becomes a real person. The catalyst for this change is Gus. He’s an outsider; he doesn’t see Cydney in the same light her family does. He regards her as someone in her own right, not just an add-on to the rest of the Parrishes. I really liked Gus, and Cydney grew on me. They both carry on conversations with their “inner selves,” sometimes out loud, and that adds a lot of humor to the read. And their first meeting is not to be missed.

The rest of the characters, while somewhat interesting, are fairly run-of-the-mill. Cydney’s pushy, self-absorbed older sister, their perfect mother who’s never gotten over her husband’s abandonment of the family once he made it big, Gus’s “colorful” country neighbors, the wacky trophy wife Cydney’s father drags along with him – while they’re all pleasant and well done, there’s really nothing new about any of them. The exceptions are Bebe and Cydney’s father. Bebe is a spoiled little girl who’s learned the fine art of emotional manipulation at the knees of a master (her mother), and her comeuppance is a moment to celebrate. Cydney’s dad is a novelist himself and Gus’s biggest rival on the bestseller lists: the two of them have a running contest to see who can insult whom the most, referring to each other as “the hack” and the “has-been,” and their run-ins are rather amusing. There’s also a twist in Dad’s current marriage that I found unusual and innovative, but I have to say that Cydney’s family adjusted to her new status as Woman in Her Own Right just a tad too easily.

There’s a lot of physical comedy in this book, what with broken noses, pratfalls, and the like; it’s a real throwback (and I mean that in a good way) to the screwball comedies of the 1930’s. At times some of the humor seems forced and the pace gets a little frenetic, with almost too much happening at once, but overall I enjoyed meeting this cockamamie cast of characters. And for the wannabe writers and already-published authors, the epilogue is not to be missed, featuring a scene that’s both a nightmare and a dream come true all in one. While not perfect, Mother of the Bride rises head and shoulders above most romances published these days, and readers who are drawn to rapid-fire dialogue and humorous situations will probably enjoy it as much as I did.