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Book Review of The True Love Wedding Dress

The True Love Wedding Dress
demiducky25 avatar reviewed on + 161 more book reviews


It's hard to rate this book over all since each story was written by a different author with some of the stories being an absolute joy and others made me keep looking to see how many pages were left before I was finished (which is why I reviewed each story separately below). This is a collection of short stories tied together by a common theme. It starts off with the prologue which tells the story of a servant girl making a wedding dress for her wealthy, spoiled mistress who is marrying the girl's love. She puts a spell on the dress to ensure happiness in love for the owner because she doesn't want to see the groom suffer. However, the spell backfires and she ends up with the love of her life and the dress mysteriously vanishes, only to turn up again in the other stories.

A Perfect Fit by Barbara Metzger- Katie acquired this dress by accident and meant to send it back to the dress shop to get her correct wedding dress, but the place burned down before she could do so. Her fiancee is killed in an accident soon after, and she is drummed out by her parents because she is pregnant with his child. Fast-forward to when Katie's daughter is ready for her wedding, and Katie wants nothing more than for her daughter to wear this special dress. But will both women be able to find love with some handsome gentlemen on the horizon? All-in-all a cute story, but it did feel a bit choppy and rushed at times.

Glad Rags by Connie Brockway- As we learned in the previous story, this dress does have certain magical qualities, including being able to perfectly fit its intended wearer. In this case, it happens to be a 6 ft + man who is made to face humiliation at a party after losing a bet with his ex-girlfriend's brother. This was the steamiest of the stories, but the plot moved rather quick, making for a quick and entertaining read. The idea of the dress "choosing" a man in this case was a very creative choice!

Something Special by Casey Claybourne- This one tells the story of a young girl growing up mostly alone out West while her father travels a lot for work. She finds the wedding dress in the attic & gets the idea to advertise for a governess back East, both to combat her own loneliness and hopefully bring someone into her father's life. Unfortunately, things don't exactly work out as planned as her father and her new governess don't exactly see eye-to-eye...This was probably my favorite of the stories because of the love-hate relationship between the two main characters, it isn't always peaches and cream between them, which allows for the sparks to fly!

Beautiful Gifts by Catherine Anderson- This one tells the story of Faith, who flees from Brooklyn with her six-year old daughter Charity to escape her oppressive father's attempts to arrange her second marriage to a man who doesn't want Charity around. They end up in No Name, Colorado with Faith working as housekeeper to Patrick O'Shannessy, a man with father issues of his own. This one read rather quickly quickly and comes very close to Something Special in competing for my favorite story in this anthology, but the way Charity talked bothered me (nothing the way a six-year old would talk, even if she was very smart as Faith mentions). Even Faith doesn't talk that way most of the time. It detracted from the story for me