The Unwedding – Ally Condie

Ellery Wainwright is alone at the edge of the world.

She and her husband, Luke, were supposed to spend their twentieth wedding anniversary together at the luxurious Resort at Broken Point in Big Sur, California. Where better to celebrate a marriage, a family, and a life together than at one of the most stunning places on earth?

But now, she’s traveling solo.

To add insult to injury, there’s a wedding at Broken Point scheduled during her stay. Ellery remembers how it felt to be on the cusp of everything new and wonderful, with a loved and certain future glimmering just ahead. Now, she isn’t certain of anything except for her love for her kids and her growing realization that this place, though beautiful, is unsettling.

When Ellery discovers the body of the groom floating in the pool in the rain, she realizes that she is not the only one whose future is no longer guaranteed. Before the police can reach Broken Point, a mudslide takes out the road to the resort, leaving the guests trapped. When another guest dies, it’s clear something horrible is brewing.

Everyone at Broken Point has a secret. And everyone has a shadow. Including Ellery.

Review

Alright, so this book felt very much like a cosy mystery instead of a thriller. Well, I would actually say that it’s more of a cosy/women’s fiction book with a mystery plot. Picture this: 60% contemporary book, 40% mystery.

I haven’t read this yet, but I think this book feels like Finlay Donovan, like it was set up or has been set up as one of those books that centres around a female main character that goes around solving murders or solving mysteries, and she has a core cast of supporting characters who are quirky and doing their thing.

I particularly say this because of the way it ended. We didn’t get the backstory of one of the main characters (I’m not gonna say who because it’s a spoiler), but since the author made sure to wrap absolutely every random thing in a bow, I felt it was kind of weird to not answer the question of who this person was, so I definitely think this was on purpose to set up a continuation.

Written in third person, we follow Ellery, who is literally just divorcing her husband, Luke, when she decides to go on the trip that was supposed to be the celebration of their 20th anniversary. There, she meets Nina and Robbie, who become her best friends during this journey, and then we meet a whole cast of characters when the trio decides to crash a wedding in the hotel they are staying in.

There were A LOT of characters, and because of the pacing of the book, I just lost interest in literally every single one of them except, sometimes, Ellery and Robbie. Robbie was absolutely my favourite character. I liked the voice Ally Condie used for him, but I still feel like he was just randomly popping up when comic relief was needed, and he was kind of treated as an afterthought. I mainly preferred the first quarter of the book, or more or less around that. I liked the beginning, and until the second body was found… then the book stalled. It became very boring. I just didn’t care at all for anything; actually, I could have decided to go read one of the ending chapters and see what happened, who did it, and for what reason.

THE END:

The final confrontation felt very cartoonish; it was quite literally a final confrontation. The scene was very out of a cheesy movie kind of thing, and Ellery was treated as the truth oracle basically, like she just knew everything. She knew everyone’s reasons for doing things; she knew everyone’s backstory; she had deduced absolutely everything, and everyone just believed her, and it was just random. She was basically like, “Oh yeah, I definitely knew this because she likes red.” That specific part where Ellery is connecting dots meme felt out of absolute nowhere.

Reasons I disliked The Unwedding:

It was marketed wrongly.
The randomness of the end, the way all things come together just because the author wanted them to be connected
Slow pacing. It felt like nothing happened for a lot of the book, even though it was a short read.

I feel like Reese definitely chooses books with a production in mind. This felt very much like a movie that you would watch during the summer in the background while you’re cleaning or something. It just feels very visually dependent.

This would have fitted more, in my opinion, as a screenplay, so in a way, I understand Reese’s selection process.

The Unwedding kind of doesn’t really work in its totality unless you keep in mind that this is not a mystery thriller; this is a contemporary mystery. I love the cover; for some reason, it influenced me to envision Ellery in a green dress!

Click for spoilers!

Catherine (the bride’s mum) kind of killed Ben by pushing him and leaving him for dead, but what ultimately killed him was drowning in the pool where Ellery found him. Catherine did this because she believed that Ben was completely planning to leave Olivia and break up, but that couldn’t have been the case at all since Ben and Olivia had already married sometime before all the book’s events.

Jason found Ben unconscious where Catherine left him and moved him to the pool. Jason (groomsman) killed Matt because Matt was feeling guilty for having helped him move Ben’s body. Jason was also blackmailing Morgan and Maddox since they were cult/ex-religious runaways and assumed new identities once free.

Grace was the shadow celebrity guest; she invented a famous app but felt ashamed of its legacy. The art thief was Gary, her dad, although he was the original artist behind the sculptures that disappeared, and he was taking them back from the hotel because they had a link to his recently deceased wife. Nina was Jason’s godmother. Andy was the senator’s son that Rachel worked for.

Ellery’s “secret” that everyone referenced so much was that while on the road to a track event, a car/bus accident happened and she moved an injured student, which resulted in her death, although Ellery had no way of knowing that that killed her.

Olivia is pregnant!