On the Way to the Wedding by Julia Quinn

The Bridgertons

#1 The Duke and I
#2 The Viscount Who Loved Me
#3 An Offer from a Gentlemen
#4 Romancing Mr. Bridgerton
#5 To Sir Phillip, With Love
#6  When He Was Wicked
#7 It's In His Kiss

In the final novel of the Bridgertons series, On the Way to the Wedding, we find Gregory, the youngest son, mooning over Lady Hermione Watson.  She is absolutely not interested in him, but Lady Lucinda Abernathy, Hermione's friend, finds herself intrigued by this aimless, charming young man.  Lucy is almost engaged though, so she tries to help Gregory in his pursuit of Hermione.

Interesting characters: Hmm...I'm actually a bit torn on this. Gregory is unusual in this world. He believes in love, after watching all of his siblings marry and live happily ever after. He wants to fall in love.  That's interesting, I think. But other than that, it's not clear what Gregory does with his time. He doesn't seem to have a job or a hobby or a tendency to sleep for eighteen hours a day.  I find myself a bit bored by him because his internal thoughts are almost exclusively about looking for love. I wonder if this is a double standard I hold, but I think not because if it were a woman having these same thoughts, I would think she was a bore, too.

Lucy is also a bit of a bore, isn't she?  She's Hermione's plain friend. She's almost engaged.  She has an older brother she doesn't see very much and she misses. Other than that, what do we know about her? 

Look, Gregory isn't an obnoxious jerk, which is unusual for the men in this series. Lucy seems like a perfectly normal woman who would probably be a good friend and would make a nice addition to your dinner party invite list.  But I'm not going to be thinking about these characters for all time.  

Believable conflict: This is actually the only thing I thought was done well in this novel. Lucy desperately wants to be with Gregory, but she is being blackmailed with something that is simultaneously not her fault and very important to her. This subplot kept Lucy and Gregory away from one another and I really appreciated how Gregory didn't just automatically assume Lucy was in the wrong, but spent a lot of effort trying to imagine why she would turn him down. It was refreshing that he didn't just assume that she wanted to be a duchess instead of being married to the fourth son.  I liked this part of the book.

Emotional tension: I think Quinn was really aiming for us to think Gregory was never going to realize his feelings for Lucy and that he'd be stuck on Hermione forever, but it didn't really work. Also, it's hard to get tension going when there's so much internal dialogue. We knew what each character was thinking at every moment. There was not time or room for tension to build. Quinn is known for her sparkling dialogue and it was absolutely missing in this book (also: no Penelope or Lady Danbury, so why was I even wasting my time?) with the exception of a brief exchange between Hyacinth and Gregory.  

Happily ever after: That is too many children for me to consider it happy. Imagine being kid #7 of 9.  My husband has an acquaintance he went to high school with who has ten children and I always feel like screaming at her that it's not 1912 anymore. Anyway, the epilogue actually stressed me out more than screamed happy to me, but if you've ever dreamed of having a giant family, maybe this is for you.

Overall, I think people should read Romancing Mister Bridgerton (or read all the books up to it, although the first three books are so problematic) and then stop reading the series. I wanted to love this beloved series, but I only loved the fourth book.  This book is definitely not required reading.