Kat French
Undertaking Love
Harper Collins / April 25, 2013 / $1.99 digital
The moment love-phobic Marla Jacobs discovers that the shop next to her Little White Wedding Chapel is to become a funeral parlour, she declares all-out war.
Marla’s chapel in the sleepy Shropshire countryside has become a nation-wide sensation, but the arrival of Funeral Director Gabriel Ryan threatens everything Marla has worked for. She can picture the scene: wedding limos fighting for space in the street with hearses; brides bumping into widows; bouquets being swapped for wreaths
Marla’s not going down without a fight. She enlists a motley crew of weird and wonderful local supporters, and the battle lines are drawn. But, as soon as Marla meets her nemesis, she realises just how much trouble she’s really in. His gypsy curls and Irish lilt make her stomach fizz—how is she supposed to concentrate on destroying him, when half the time she’s struggling not to rip the shirt off his back?
American ex-pat Marla Jacobs has worked hard to make The Little White Wedding Chapel the quirky national sensation that it is, despite the fact that the Vegas-style chapel resides in a most unlikely location—the sleepy English countryside. The marriage business is booming, and the icing on the cake? There's a new cupcake bakery setting up shop on their street. With every bang of the hammer and clang of the workmen out front, Marla envisions a union of sorts, the beginnings of a beautiful relationship between the bakery and the chapel. She can practically taste the scrumptious wedding cake samples and daily sweet treats they'll all be enjoying with their afternoon tea courtesy of their new neighbor.
Love adult contemporary romance and YA, but wish you could have the best of both? A book driven by the unique hormonal intensity of first young love, filled with relatable trials and tribulations of becoming an adult, but featuring more mature protagonists like say twenty-somethings and more satisfying intimate love scenes?
If romance readers admit to having a guilty pleasure, it’s not so much about the genre we choose to read, but the tropes within the genre: Secretly loving alpha men with their monosyllabic commands and caveman-ish ways or enjoying forbidden boss/secretary love in an elevator scenarios. Romance readers tolerate behavior in books that in real life would have us kicking them to the curb or crying sexual harassment for sure.
