A Winter Book Report . . .

What did I do on my holiday vacation? Read, of course! I put together a little book report on one of the books I read for the site Goodreads.com.



One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding by Rebecca Mead

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars
A few pages into the first chapter, I almost set this book aside, finding it a bit too hard-bitten and cynical to complete during a harsh Minnesota winter. I like to do my serious reading in the summer, next to the pool, when my spirits don't need buoying after an icy commute.

I ended up finishing this book despite its dark commercial overtones about the wedding industry and business of getting married. Rebecca Mead's stellar writing is the reason. Her lucid descriptions of the characters she met along her research path kept me enthralled. The many brides and grooms are described sometimes in ungenerous terms, and for their sake I'm glad Mead kept their names secret, unlike the wedding professionals interviewed for the book. Mead does an wonderful job of straddling the two diverse spheres of brides presented by the wedding industry, in one sphere the divine maiden, in the other, the foul-mouthed Bridezilla. She struggles into the middle area where real brides and grooms exist, neither profane, nor sacred, just fallibly human. In the end, a single honest sentence and a half in the epilogue made this entire book worth reading. Mead writes of her own wedding as an atheist, " . . . we had no choice but to invent a wedding for ourselves. In just about every dimension of our lives we were at liberty from tradition's infringements, and grateful for it; but we were without tradition's anchors and consolations, too." Mead's book shows how most modern American brides and grooms are free to choose from any commercially endorsed traditions or none at all, but how the price of this freedom is a loss of assurance and comfort in the traditions of culture or religion.


View all my reviews.