What do readers think of The Wedding Gift by Marlen Suyapa Bodden? Write your own review.

This is a well written book about slavery in the south. The characters are very real and you feel a connection to them. The book chapters are written from the perspective of different characters in the story. Like The Help and Kitchen Girl, this reviews a painful time of our history. The author writes in a style that is engaging and fast paced. I look forward to her second book.

Avery is left with her grandmother's house after she passes, a wealthy family buys it, and they hire Avery to manage this house and their entire neighborhood of exclusive, rented summer cottages.

Avery is an excellent manager, becomes friends with the Lowman's daughter, Sadie, and is treated like family, and then is faced with Sadie's death that is being ruled as a suicide. Avery knows Sadie wouldn't kill herself and especially on the night of the annual Plus-One end-of-the-summer party.

Avery stuck to her theory that Sadie didn't commit suicide, and she found a few things to prove the police investigation hadn't been thorough and that no one could be trusted.

Her investigation made me nervous, though, because of the way she went about gathering evidence.

We move from chapter to chapter telling the before and after of Avery and Sadie's friendship and of the goings on at the rental community. Was Sadie really Avery’s friend or did she think of Avery as the help and pretend to be her friend? Was anyone really Avery's friend?

I was a bit confused at first about what was going, but once Avery found evidence and clues about what really happened and things were revealed, the interest kicked up.

THE LAST HOUSE GUEST will be for you if you enjoy a beach setting, characters that have secrets, characters that are broken, and a mystery that keeps you guessing.

The ending is definitely a surprise. 4/5

This book was given to me as ARC by the publisher via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review.

I’m still not sure where or when the prologue was supposed to take place – perhaps it was a dream?

After some very stilted conversations and an inconsistent use of dialect, the story is interesting and holds your attention to the end. However, there are too many coincidences and the slaves are often well cared for (or allowed a lot of free time) by slave owners we are supposed to be appalled and repelled by. That is not to say slaves were not ill-treated and horribly abused, they were. Just that the depiction is as inconsistent as the dialect.

Fathers in the antebellum South are shown as overbearing, browbeating, abusive scoundrels. Mothers are meek and cowed. Sons are distant and uncaring. In other words many of the characters are caricatures. Still I enjoyed the book.

Book groups will be discussing slavery, abusive husbands and fathers, the role of women, education priorities, gossip and social ostracism among other topics. A comparison with The Help, To Kill a Mockingbird and/or The Color Purple would be an interesting discussion.

The Wedding Gift has two main characters that could be great. The wife of an abusive plantation master and his illegitimate daughter--they could tell us so much about the experiences of women of that time and place. But, this book falls far short of similar novels by telling in bland voices instead of showing the reader so they get drawn in. The most disappointing element is a shift at the very end of the novel that changes completely the reader's ideas about the main characters.