Something New: Tales from a Makeshift Bride
Lucy Knisley
I enjoy Knisley’s style and especially liked her book “Displacement.” (I also feel like I read “Relish,” but Goodreads does not have a record of me doing so–perhaps I just read parts while my partner was reading it.) I just wasn’t able to engage with this book the way I was with “Displacement.” The earlier book succeeded with me because Knisley used her lighthearted style to engage with a weighty subject. Although I sympathized with a lot of the frustrations of wedding planning–especially as a couple wanting to avoid following patriarchal traditions–the book lacked for me a sense of how the experience might have changed the characters or relationships with one another. (There is an interesting brief mention of the difficulty of reconciling marriage and bisexuality, but it’s not addressed in depth.)