Review: 'The Bridesmaid' by Nina Manning

The common idea is that every little girl looks forward to her wedding day with heightened anticipation and joy. But weddings are also the coming together of two dangerous forces: families and alcohol! What secrets can erupt at a wedding? Which won't? And how long, exactly, has everyone been preparing for this moment? Enter The Bridesmaid! Thanks to Boldwood Books and NetGalley for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

Pub. Date: 5/27/2021
Publisher: Boldwood Books

Your best friend. Your worst nightmare...
From the moment they met as children, Sasha knew that beautiful, wealthy, and confident Caitlin would always be her absolute best friend. Sasha would do anything to make Caitlin happy.

Even keep her darkest secrets…

The years have passed, but their friendship remains. And when Caitlin announces she’s getting married there is only one choice for the role of bridesmaid. Sasha will make sure Caitlin’s wedding is as beautiful and perfect as she is. Won’t she?

But as the big day approaches, cracks begin to appear. Because no matter what Sasha does, she never seems to make Caitlin happy.

And the secrets that once bound these two friends, now threaten to rip them apart for good...

Childhood friendships can run very deep. Someone you meet during a blistering summer holiday can stay a part of you for the rest of your life. A friendship as intense as Caitlin and Sasha's, who see each other during the former's school holidays when she returns to her family's Saxby estate, is bound to be life-altering. As both girls grow into teenagers they experience some of the trials and tribulations of girlhood together, yet the chasm of class remains between them. Neither Caitlin nor Sasha will ever forget that the latter's parents work for Caitlin's grandmother. Friendship is complex this way, both a thing that can erase social differences and something that can starkly highlight them. Manning explores this in The Bridesmaid, as much as the format of a suspense thriller allows, and shows the after-effects on Sasha to grow up near, yet always excluded, from immense wealth and possibilities. I do like some social commentary in my thrillers, so I was glad to see that Saxby wasn't just used as a glamorous backdrop. 

Sasha is planning Caitlin's wedding and it all needs to be perfect. It needs to be perfect because she has something prepared, a surprise that will most likely break her friendship with Caitlin but will unburden her nonetheless. Does it have to do something with the Saxby estate and its many closed doors? With Caitlin's soon-to-be-husband, Chuck, who is on very friendly terms with Sasha? Or maybe it is to do with that one fateful night at Saxby of which Sasha never speaks. Moving back and forth between the last decades of the twentieth century and the wedding preparation, Manning creates a tight web of memories and moments, each raising the stakes chapter by chapter. In The Bridesmaid Manning addresses the tension between mothers and daughters, the pressures to be perfect, and the dangers of a too-tight friendship. Sasha is our narrator for both the past and the present and as we see everything through her eyes we can't help but be on her side. Although I occasionally found her a bit much in the present, her past experiences always helped me see her in a different light. The twists come hard and fast at the end and, for once, I was genuinely surprised. I had raised an eyebrow, here or there, at the breadcrumbs dropped by Manning, but I had not expected where she was leading me. With all story-lines tied up, some almost too nicely, I could see how the threads had been spun from the very start.

I had seen Nina Manning's other thriller and suspense novels around but this one was the first I picked up. I really liked the way in which she dug into and explained the little insecurities that shoot through a friendship, the desperation you can sometimes feel to be liked, the harsh blow of rejection. The Bridesmaid does start a bit slow, but this is largely due to the fact that Manning spends the first third of the novel on carefully setting up all her chess pieces. While this could have sped up, it did mean that once the plot really took off we were all properly centered. Although she does her best to flesh out all the different characters, there is something of a remove when it comes to Caitlin and her family. Perhaps this is an intentional distance, as Sasha feels this distance too, but it means they occasionally run the danger of feeling like rich people caricatures. Overall, however, I couldn't bear to put The Bridesmaid down for long. I read it in a whirlwind, sneaking in chapters in between classes, naps and other responsibilities. I'll definitely be trying to get my hands on Manning's other novels.

I give this book...

4 Universes!

I greatly enjoyed The Bridesmaid and raced through it. Although it starts of slow, I simply couldn't put it down until I got to find out what major secret lay at the heart of the Saxby estate.