Book Review: Fighting Happily Ever After

Title: Fighting Happily Ever After

Author: Elena Aitken

Date: 2020

Quote: "A wedding planner who didn't believe in love!"

It is possible to feel that you're laughing at the three couples of clueless young people in this book more than you're laughing with them. They spend a lot of time crying and worrying about things no one else would take seriously. All's well in the end, of course, even if one of the three couples end up not marrying each other...guess which one? 

Not Hope and Levi; they're already married, and Hope has no regrets even in the middle of a difficult pregnancy. So, will Faith or...wait for it...Stephanie be married at the end of the book? Aitken undertakes the challenge of adding suspense to a romance novel. Though you know there's going to be a sequel in which the other one will be married, anyhow.

Faith is afraid to love anyone (does this ever happen in real life?} because, as a teenager, she discovered that her happily married parents did fight. Worse, her lifelong boy friend, Logan, whose cousin Levi is married to Faith's twin sister Hope, is one of those little boys who express affection by teasing and needling little girls. 

We as a culture need to do something about this. Little boys are becoming baby-daddies before they learn that little girls never did like to be teased. Who knows how many children might have a chance to grow up in unbroken homes if nobody had told their fathers that it was acceptable or even cute to annoy little girls. We know little boys mature slowly and develop empathy slowly, so we need to be teaching them...first by exposing them to domestic animals who could teach them, before they meet girls of their own size. "That hen/dog/cat told you to back off. You didn't. You deserved that little nip. When anyone tells you to back off, you must back off. Likewise, when people tell you to stop talking to them, you must shut your mouth up tight, and when they tell you to leave them alone, you must leave them completely alone, not even looking at them. No means No. No is not negotiable. If you ever do meet a person who says No when she means Yes, which some people used to do a long time ago, you will just have to teach her to do what she says, say what she means, because one thing leads to another." And then when they meet little girls, we need to enforce this. "Did you see her move back away from you? Did you hear her say 'Leave me alone'? LEAVE HER ALONE. If you want to talk to her because you like her, don't do things that make her not like you. You must not even look at her until she talks to you. Don't ever speak to any person who is not looking at you and smiling. If you have to scream for help, raise your face toward Heaven and don't look at any individual person until someone speaks to you! In a civilized country this will keep you out of prison; in some countries it will save your life." 

Arguably the world needed a Canadian novel that shows how close a character comes to losing his True Love by teasing, because, a hundred years ago, Anne of Green Gables...lived in a different world. We need to make that absolutely clear. Delightful character. Different world. 

Anyway, even at paperback novel length, Aitken manages to weave in a secondary plot. Faith and Logan are not just fake dating, but fake living together, in order to attract Stephanie Starz (does even Hollywood give actors stage names that bad, in real life?) to Faith's business for the movie-star wedding of the decade. Anyone could have told them that either fake or real living-together-as-a-couple-before-marriage is no way to promote a wedding business, though if only some more of either family were living in the house, to support the claim that they were living-together-not-as-a-couple, maybe... 

But Stephanie is too young to think through these things, just like Faith and Logan and Hope and Levi, so she's sure that being married at the place where twins met their True Loves will bring her marriage good luck...well. She and her fiance have some living and learning to do, too. And, to find out which couple Aitken thinks are ready for marriage right away and which couple need to think it over, you'll just have to read the book.

I laughed...even though sometimes I was laughing at characters crying. Elena Aitken has sold a lot of romance novels, many featuring the romantic appeal of rural or small-town Canada, though they sell on this side of the border too. This novel is part of a series that's done reasonably well too. If the fake living together (yes, it does tempt them into bed together) doesn't put you off, you're likely to enjoy this novel and want the rest of the series. Aunts are supposed to recommend sweet wholesome romances where we never see unmarried couples undressing each  other. Sorry. But I did laugh.