Wow this was bad. I don’t even know what to say. This did not need to be 301 pages. I started this book last year and it became my bathtub book because hey at least it didn’t make me sleepy, I was too busy raging and soaking. The entire concept of this book is that a man does not listen to his girlfriend and it goes on for 300 pages. That’s it. And there are songs that are sung at weddings. And I just wish that it could have been better than it was, but it’s just two deeply unpleasant people who need therapy who you actively root against while you are reading. If I met either of them in real life, I would have cut them off.
Songs for Other People’s Weddings follows song-writer/wedding singer J. J and his girlfriend V are happyish. At least J thinks they are. And when V gets an opportunity to move to New York temporarily for her job, she jumps at it. But it leaves J wondering where they are with each other and what does this mean for them long-term.
Since the majority of the book is about J and V’s relationship I have to say it’s toxic as heck and one wonders how they even ended up together. Levithan tells you, but I think that whole thing of how they meet was just definitely setting up hey maybe you two should have left each other alone. I never felt like J was in love with V. He was in love with someone focusing their attention on him and his songs. You see him floundering badly when she moves because he’s used to her being 100 percent available to him. And V just doesn’t act like she even likes J as a person.
There are other characters in this book, but again, they are not developed well. Just wedding couples that are there to set the scene for whatever is going on with J. We have some characters that should have been developed better (V’s boss, V’s best friend, J’s friend Tom, etc).
When the setting moves to New York the whole book slows down badly. I didn’t get a sense of New York at all in this book. Heck, I didn’t even get a sense of Sweden. We just move from wedding one to whatever wedding we ended on and neither location was developed well enough into this story. New York can be a character of itself, but I was looking forward to reading about Sweden and you don’t get that here.
The ending took forever. I kept thinking what more is there to say, and then there was just more pages.
