The Wedding Party (2024) by L.R. Jones follows two women: FBI agent Andi Castle and ER nurse and bride-to-be Carrie Reynolds. Andi is looking for a weekend away when she is invited by a mutual friend to go on Carrie and her fiance’s joint bachelor/bachelorette trip. When Carrie’s fiance turns up dead, Andi finds herself thrown into the investigation, and Carrie is looking like a prime suspect. Jones’s thriller is unique in the duality of her characters. Many of the principal characters display lovable and straightforward personalities until they later reveal more secrets or complexities to who they are. 

When everyone, including FBI agent Andi, is won over by the killer’s lovable surface, the reader is largely won over too. This is a novel that keeps secrets not only from its characters but from its readers as well, making the reveal of the killer a betrayal of perception to the reader as well as to lead investigator Andi. Andi’s initial gut instinct and the reader’s was wrong. Jones effectively fools the reader with her characters’ straightforward personalities to the point that the reader has a hard time believing anyone could be the killer. 

Not only was the discovery of which member of the wedding party killed the groom-to-be shocking, but the lengths to which Andi was willing to go to solve this case came as a shock as well. Andi spends much of the novel disapproving of the actions of people around her, including her father. Early in the novel, she acknowledges her fear of turning out like her father when a previous case “threatened to prove that [she’s] just like him” (23). What changes throughout the novel is Andi’s attitude towards being like her father. Seeing all the good in him, she begins to recognize that being like him might not be the worst thing in the world. Ultimately, she chooses to be like him, finishing the case as “a proud Castle” (319). 

While the duality of personalities is a central theme in the novel, its main purpose is to emphasize the overarching theme of daughters being like their fathers. Several main characters, including Andi, choose to embrace that similarity to their fathers as the novel progresses, often contrary to their forward facing personalities. They embrace their ancestry and the legacy left behind by their fathers, either to their benefit or to their detriment. Overall, this fast-paced thriller depicts an unsuspecting killer and a determined investigator with strong female characters with strong connections to their fathers that allows for an interesting conflict throughout the novel.

In her 2023 chapbook Animal Unfit published by Belle Point Press, Megan Nichols writes about her experience of being a mother. The collection has three sections, in which the final section is one poem — a crown of sonnets. Nichols’s poetry discusses motherhood by reflecting on her own mother’s parenting, the pregnancy and birth of her son, and her own parenting. She depicts the shame that surrounds her experiences as a mother in a physical and religious context throughout her collection, often using fruit imagery to draw connections between the two. 

Using fruit imagery, Nichols discusses the idea of shame in the physical requirements of motherhood. In “Rind,” the second poem in the collection, Nichols compares her body to a watermelon that her son had been “scooped out of,” making her womb the empty rind (4). The cover photo matches this poem as a smashed watermelon spills seeds and juice onto the ground. In birthing a child, the woman is left broken in some ways. There is an obvious physical brokenness, but there is a change to the self as well. She is no longer woman but mother, unable to exist without the connection to that motherhood. Many women struggle with the idea (or the actuality) of motherhood as a loss of individuality, and Nichols captures that fear and shame here. She also calls out her physical shame in not being able to have a vaginal birth or to breastfeed (as depicted in “Confessional”). These are two central parts of motherhood that she feels she has failed at. 

At the start of the second section, she returns to the use of fruit imagery in “Without the Apple.” She invites the reader to “Imagine Eve with no red skin / between her teeth” (17). If Eve had not eaten the apple, then we would not have to start out with this “inherited sin” in us before we ever sinned ourselves (17). The childbirth she describes throughout the collection would not be surrounded by pain and tragedy if it were not for this fruit. Womanhood would not be surrounded by shame without Eve’s act, and Nichols acknowledges this in her imagery. At another point, she refers to her unborn son as “an unripe plum” (19), and I cannot help but connect this reference to fruit back to Eve’s original sin. Even in utero, her son is a reference to a fruit. Nichols draws the line between motherhood and/or womanhood and sin.

Some of Nichols’s shame comes from her previous desire not to be a mother. In the final poem of “Describing the Soul to My Son,” she addresses her son, “I hope you never understand how our life / makes a younger version of me sick” (36). Even though Nichols did not picture herself as a mother, she became one. There is some shame in that: shame that she became a mother at all and shame that she ever wishes she was not one now. Animal Unfit has strong imagery and technique that allows Nichols to dig beyond the surface level of her life. While I focused on the theme of shame in this collection, there is also an overwhelming theme of love and appreciation for the people in her life, the earth, and all the experiences the two have given her. 

Read my book review on The Neon Hollywood Cowboy at the link below:

https://www.usi.edu/sir/meter-reader/matt-mitchell-review