Abandoned by Booklikes

The main character is Dakota Halifax who is a wedding planner extraordinaire living in Las Vegas. Eloping with her fiancee Grant on a cruise ship is not what she imagined her dream wedding to be but all she wants is to be married to Grant. Too bad Grant stands her up at the altar.

I really can't say anything besides the fact I found the book boring and shallow in characterization and meaning. I think that there were a lot of elements that should have worked better than they did.

Also this book was split into parts and I honestly could not understand why. To me if you do part one, part two, etc. it is because there is some major plot elements going on that you want to cue the reader to while reading. I just think it was done to make the book look cute. For example, Part III reads:

Wary Canary-Elevated

(Significant Risk of Elevated Blood Pressure, Quickened Heart Rate, Possibility of Tears, And Being in Need of Tissues)

Then there was an Oscar Wilde quote included too. I was fine with the above but included all of that and the a quote about men, women, friendship, and love.

Dakota returns from her jilting and starts hanging out with an old friend from her childhood Brendan and trying to make sense of things with Grant. I felt like a lot of the novel was just filler to get to the happily ever after at the end.

Also Dakota has some serious issues with her mother that I wish had been explored more beyond well that's just my mom. We find out that her mother divorced Dakota's father when she was fairly young and she was barely around while she was growing up. To me this would be a good time to show Dakota gaining some self awareness about her mom and Grant leaving her could have brought everything to a head for the character. Too bad it didn't. I did end up liking the piece of advice her mother gave her towards the end of the book though.

The other characters in this book really were not written with enough depth for me to care about them one way or another. We have Dakota's best friend Jillian who only seems to be around to give her advice. Grant was a big blank space for me the entire time. I had no idea what to make of that guy. Same goes with the character of Brendan. I did not see what made her interested in him at all. A blank wall had more personality than him. Dakota's constant inner monologues about how sexy he was made me roll my eyes after the tenth time it was mentioned.

Also the setting of this book is Las Vegas. You wouldn't really know it though since that city really is just a background that is not really used. I was in Vegas recently and there's no sense of being overwhelmed by the nightly crowd of people, the way the casinos look in the early morning and at night, the fountains in front of the Bellagio, etc.

Besides some throw away lines about meeting people in a casino here and there there was not much to show me this took place in Sin City.

With the ending telegraphed pretty early for me I wasn't surprised by it at all. I just ended up shrugging (literally) when I got to the end of this book and loaned it out to a friend to see if she would like it any better than I did.