Home for the wedding

Spirited and beautiful Stacey Marsh made a mistake -- she should never have come home for her wedding. She had forsaken her hometown of Dorsham, England, long ago because it was too quiet, too provincial, not at all the kind of place for the likes of Stacey. In sophisticated Paris she had met sophisticated Jules Charbonnier, the man she planned to marry. So why hadn't she just married him in Paris instead of insisting upon an English wedding? As soon as Stacey returns to Dorsham, she senses something wrong. The town simply doesn't look the way it is supposed to. The quiet village she had yawned over is now frantic with community activity. Her family, the gentle and stable people she had always relied upon, are clearly not themselves, claiming that Stacey's grandfather's ghost has come back to haunt them; and and for Nigel -- the boy next door -- well, he is simply too handsome and aggressive for his own good. Things become even more complicated when, with only one week to go til the wedding, Jules and his formidable grandmother, Madame Charbonnier, arrive in England. Not only is Stacey completely incapable of explaining the strange behavior in Dorsam, she is having difficulty interpreting her peculiar behavior. Stacey has but a few days to decide whether what she is feeling is merely homesickness or whether it is something else, for why does Dorsham seem gayer then gay Paris? Why does her family seem so much more colorful than before? And what makes the boy next door so much more attractive than the boy next door should look?

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.