The Secret Bridesmaid Review

Sophie Breeze is "The Secret Bridesmaid", hiring out her organizational skills to brides before, during and after their big day and she truly enjoys her job. That is until she finds herself needing all her professionalism and talent after being hired to help Lady Cordelia Swann, against the bride's will.

General Impressions

While the synopsis grabbed my attention I was still surprised by how much I liked the beginning and Sophie in particular. This seemed to be a sweet and fun romance, which was just what I needed, so I happily gave it a chance.

Often in romcoms, the romance plot is permanently at the centre of the protagonist's mind but that is never the case here so that was a fun change. Something else I really appreciated was that Sophie was both a career woman and in love with her job but that was never seen as a hindrance to her romantic life or an excuse to treat other people badly. She was a truly lovely person who was in love with what she did and I liked seeing that portrayed not only in this genre but in a female character. (I don't know why, but she really reminded me of Louisa Clark in Me Before You in the joy her inner voice and embarrassing accidents made me feel.)

While Sophie was a smart businesswoman that was passionate and made happy by what she did, some of the funniest scenes in the book involved her brides and the crazy things she ended up doing to make them happy. If you are afraid this is just another white bread/ white romance filled with white people being white I also have some (*tiny*) good news: although most of the main characters are canonically white, there is a lot of diversity on the brides Sophie worked for and it was really fun to see the different things she needed to do depending on the type of ceremony.

As the story goes on though, I found myself losing a bit of my enthusiasm. The book felt a bit undecided between being a rom-com or just a plain romance, some of the characters seemed a bit unfinished and the romance was just meh. If you are an Emily in Paris/ The Devil Wears Prada buff though you'll find a lot to cackle about in Cordelia's shenanigans and Sophie countermoves. This is not my girl's first rodeo for sure!

On a more serious note, this book does touch on some very serious themes such as drug abuse, paparazzi culture, toxic friendships, online harassment and how being surrounded by bad people and growing up in the spotlight can destroy your self-confidence and mental health at the same it imbues people with a sense of privilege they don't deserve. That being said, there is not a single character that even smells a consequence for their bad behaviour, especially rich women.

Conclusions

This is the back of my proof! Isn't it brilliant?

I found Cordelia's love story and her friendship with Sophie's so much more interesting that I wish this had been a dual perspective between Cordelia's machiavellian plans to break Sophie until they became friends and her relationship and love story with her groom and Sophie's side but I was still happy to see all these characters have a happy ending and all I could think while reading it was that I would binge-watch the hell out of this if it ever gets adapted.

Thanks to Hodder and Stoughton for sending me this proof.

Rating: 3.5/5