I had read The Proposal last year when I got in in my Book of the Month Club. I enjoyed it, but it didn’t stick with me. I then read a Cannonballer’s review of The Wedding Date and thought I’d give it a try.
The Wedding Date tells the story of Alexa, Chief of Staff to the Mayor of Berkeley, CA. She gets stuck in a hotel elevator when on her way to meet her sister and ends up spending time trapped with Drew. Drew is a pediatric surgeon in town for the wedding of his ex-girlfriend to his former best friend and he is afraid of looking idiotic by showing up alone. He convinces Alexa to join him for the wedding festivities and pretend to be his girlfriend. Their arrangement turns in to a fling, but commitment-phobic Drew and self-conscious Alexa keep throwing obstacles in their own paths to happiness.
The Proposal is an off-shoot of The Wedding Date. Nik is a freelance-writer who is surprised at a baseball game by a jumboTron proposal from her (very casual) boyfriend. She meets Carlos, a pediatrician, when he rescues her from the ensuing crowd after the proposal goes badly. Carlos was featured in The Wedding Date as Drew’s best friend and his main outlet to work out his feelings about Alexa. Here, Carlos gets his own story (with Drew and Alexa popping in as background characters) as he and Nik turn a chance encounter in to a friendship and then more. The same themes are in both books- fear of commitment preventing true happiness and stability, the importance of having girlfriends that have your back.
Both books are cute, quick reads great for a rainy weekend or a day at the beach.
I do have one MAJOR thing to point out though- Drew seems to have missed the ethics classes in medical school, and the ethics lectures in internship and residency, and then again the mandatory privacy training for his hospital system. I hope that no one reads The Wedding Date and thinks that Drew 1) bringing his hook up to the hospital to meet a patient without discussion with that patient’s parents and 2) sharing details of that patient’s illness with his hookup is anything other than unethical and illegal. That’s not something that is done. If Drew really needed to get in to his feelings about something so he would have to run to Alexa to further the plot, there are a lot of ways to make that happen without Drew becoming a horny HIPPA violation.