published 1991, Del Rey

I bet you thought your wedding was hell. Bad enough that it poured rain and the caterer didn't show up. How would you like to have an obstreperous mage overseeing the proceedings?

Kyra, from Barbara Hambley's Stranger at the Wedding, is determined to spoil her sister's wedding day. There's this little matter of a premonition; Kyra's mage-sense is telling her that her sister will die the day she makes her marriage vows. The situation swiftly descends into unhappy farce as Kyra uses every trick in her magical repertoire to keep the big event from taking place. She's got her father, her sister's fiance, and a couple of witch-hunters to deal with, not to mention that her sister is secretly in love with someone else ...

Hambley maintains her setting and characterization with ease. Along with Kyra, the reader becomes deeply ill at ease amidst the mannered upper-middle-class, whose marriage customs seem fantastical only to those who haven't studied the Chinese. Or the Romans. Or (gasp) our own society.

The main detraction from an otherwise engaging storyline is a bad case of villain bloat. Hambley draws the reader into feeling sympathetic to the character she later exposes as the villain by describing his kindly nature. This actually robs Kyra of guilt for what she does to him, and also deprives the villain of complexity. He is a real bad guy, but I disliked having my sympathy yanked around. I think the book would have been a lot stronger if Kyra had acted on suspicion rather than proof, or if the villain had acted against her family out of some desire other than pure spite.

Other than the sheer unbridled viciousness of the villain, this book is a light, engaging, romantic romp through a comedy of manners.

Review by Becky Parkhurst
Reviewed June 23, 1996

ISBN 0-345-38097-5

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