Goddess Fish Book Tours Book Review: Our Bridal Shop

Our Bridal Shop

by Danielle Blaire

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GENRE: Women's Fiction

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BLURB:

Every family has its secrets, and the March family is no exception.

For the March sisters, Match Made in Devon, the bridal shop opened and run by their parents, was a real-world representation of what true love was all about. But for eldest sister Alexandra that kind of perfection has always seemed unreachable.

Alex has spent over fifteen years in Boston, building up an impenetrable shell of confidence and taking control over her own destiny. If there’s anything missing from her life, it isn’t important anyway. But with her mother’s unexpected death Alex is forced to leave her life in the big city behind and return to her hometown of Devon…and a past she’s been running from for years.

As the March sisters try to salvage the bridal shop their parents loved, Alex is forced to confront her painful past and the real reason she left Devon so many years ago…including childhood sweetheart Jonah Dufort.

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Excerpt:

Weddings don’t wait for death; you have to get on with the living.

That’s what Alexandra March’s mother would have said had she not been in the earth beneath her feet. Fat, ambitious blades of grass tangled and clawed from the dirt, dusted with the rarest of phenomenon in lower Mississippi: snow.

Hell had, in fact, frozen over.

Beside her, Alex’s sister Charlotte mined her purse for a tissue and settled on one of those congealed bundles that only mothers ignore. Six weeks on and she still unraveled. Alex supposed it was what came from being the youngest, the one who didn’t get out of town, the one who dutifully fit brides into their dresses at the family bridal shop, Match Made in Devon, even though that dream had been their mother’s happily ever after. Charlotte was also the one who had walked through the front door of their childhood home one week before Christmas—as she had nearly every day for the past thirty-five years—saw Mama’s red boots on the linoleum at all the wrong angles and dropped two dozen eggs at once. Heart attack, they said. Alex knew better. Had there been such a thing as functional-grief syndrome, Stella Irene March would have died from it. Maybe it would have taken them all.

“The flowers are beautiful,” Alex said.

Daisies dyed artificial purple. A clearance-rack bridesmaid’s dress against a landscape of virgin lace. Slipped into the tubular stone appendage Charlotte insisted they add to their parents’ tombstone as a flower receptacle. It looks like an erection, Alex had whispered in her sister’s ear at the funeral home over their ala carte grief menu, to which Charlotte had promptly pressed a well-aimed heel into the leather toe of Alex’s Guiseppe Beneventi boot.

“They’re hideous. All they had at the F—F—oooood Saver.” Charlotte’s thick drawl navigated her grief like a hummingbird landing in molasses. “Said delivery drivers got wind of the snow and turned right back toward Alabama.”

Alex put a stiff arm around her sister. At the gesture, Charlotte disintegrated into grand, hiccupping gasps. Wet bubbles of words that required subtitles. Alex pulled her close, rested her cheek against her sister’s chilled, blonde strands. Charlotte was dressed in thin layers, a reluctance to accept the cold bite of snow. She had always been like that. Believing in something to make it so. Ill-prepared for what the world outside Devon brought her but always warm, like summer. Unlike Alex, who was nothing but winter inside.

Review:  The cover of this book is so stunning. It was the thing that really drew me to this book. This is, however more than a book with a pretty cover. Its a story about family and what happens when one of the family is gone and what happens when you find out the people that you loved had a lot of secrets. That doesn't include the secrets the main character is keeping.

Alex isn't the most easy heroines to love, but she does grow on you after awhile, however not by much. This is a story that you'll want to stay with because of the other characters. Alex was the sister that grew up and went away from her hometown and moved to Boston. Her life is far from perfect and she's less than nice to just about everyone, including her high school sweetheart. In fact, the only person she's really nice to, is Jonah's young daughter. When a family secret comes out giving Alex and Charlotte a sister they didn't know they had, she's really hard to deal with.

There's a lot of family drama but a lot of humor too, but what life isn't without stress and humor? 

You see Alex grow a lot in this story and really you need to, because she isn't someone you'd like much unless she did. Her relationship with Jonah's daughter is really the thing that makes her likable. Plus when you understand what happened in her past things make a little more sense. She's very goal oriented and a perfectionist, and she learns that being perfect isn't always what you want to be.

One of my favorite quotes came from her sister Charlotte when she returned home again, after some major upheaval in Alex's life "The way I see it, home is a soft place to fall and no one questioning you at the bottom."

I can't wait to get to know Charlotte and Freesia better in books to come, because even though you saw some things through their eyes, you really want to know them more. I also want to see how Match Made In Devon does under their ownership.

This was really a good read!

Rating: 4 flowers

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AUTHOR Bio and Links:

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Danielle-Blair-1794550060852703/

Danielle Blair escaped the slog of her former accounting job to instead pursue writing women’s fiction. She pens empowering stories about women, for women, that focus on a woman’s unique journey to find her place in the modern world.

But this wasn’t always the case. Following a messy divorce, Danielle took to reading and writing to help sort out the whirlwind of emotions she was dealing with. What started as a coping mechanism turned into a passion and in 2017 she transitioned to writing full time. Along the winding journey to authorship she also met and married her current husband, who is the love of her life.

She writes her books with the help of her two sisters—Jennifer helps to plot out the stories, while Linda is the beady eye behind the editing of them. Since setting up the tire swing in their back yard together as kids, they’ve always worked better as a team—so why not write a book together?

She is the mother of two handsome adult sons, and three dogs that act like children (but she loves them anyway). When not lost writing her next book, Danielle can be found outside digging in the dirt, trying to coax her husband to just try yoga once, and cooking meals that may or may not end up burned every once and a while.

https://www.amazon.com/Bridal-Shop-Match-Made-Devon-ebook/dp/B07MKZZKXG/

The book is on sale for $0.99.

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GIVEAWAY INFORMATION and RAFFLECOPTER CODE:

Danielle Blaire will be awarding a $10 Amazon or Barnes and Noble GC to a randomly drawn winner via rafflecopter during the tour.

Please use this rafflecopter code on your post:

http://www.rafflecopter.com/rafl/display/28e4345f2917/" rel="nofollow" data-raflid="28e4345f2917" data-theme="classic" data-template="" id="rcwidget_keu00hdg">a Rafflecopter giveaway