The Wedding Dress by Rachel Hauck

One dress with a story spanning a century. Four brides with four unique lives in four different generations. 

Those two lines probably have you thinking you know exactly what this book is about. Aw, it’s been done before, you say. Maybe so, but never like this. 

Charlotte is a modern woman running a successful wedding dress boutique in the American south and suffering from twinges of panic without understanding why at the thought of marrying her wonderful, family-man, architect, studmuffin  of a fiancé. Orphaned as a young child, she can hardly remember a time she wasn’t lonely, until Tim showed up and won her heart in a whirlwind romance. They were each everything the other had always wanted. So why, then, the feeling that it was all just going too fast?

Emily was desperately in love with Daniel when he left to play ball semi-professionally in 1912. By the time he came back to claim her heart only 5 months later, her father had given his blessing to an offer of marriage from the son of one of the weathiest families in Birmingham…

 Mary Grace fell in love with her childhood chum and in the midst of the Great Depression, he asked her to be his wife and to go away with him to serve the Lord by hosting tent meetings all across the country...

Hillary married her Marine fiancé on a whim just before he shipped out to Vietnam, and only a few months later she received back his dog tags, threw them in a trunk with the dress she wore the day she married him, and welded the trunk shut...

 

One day Charlotte found herself wandering through a random auction when something made her bid on a worn out old trunk, welded shut. The auctioneer wore vibrant purple and when he looked at her, it felt as if his eyes bore into her soul.

Little did she know that the contents of that trunk would connect her life forever to these other three women, and to one of them in ways she could never have imagined…

My cousin calls me a book snob. I don’t read many novels these days unless they are old enough to be considered “classic.” But if I do, they generally have to be Christian ones, because I often find contemporary secular novels a bit too graphic and crude (There are always exceptions, though :)). But, being a supposed “book snob”, I am very sensitive to contrived spirituality or overly-done religiosity in these books, leaving a story flat or shallow (Walking with Christ is REAL LIFE, people, and Christians are human too). Thus, I generally reach for my classics when needing a novel break. That said, it’ll mean something when I tell you that I have literally been purposely dragging out my reading of Rachel Hauck’s The Wedding Dress, luxuriating in its lines, in its love stories, in its twists and turns; savouring the feeling of being lost in the plot of a contemporary Christian novel without a hint of that tell-tale cringe. 

I still wish I hadn’t quite reached the end…

*I received this book free from Thomas Nelson Publishers as part of their BookSneeze.com book review bloggers program. I was not required to write a positive review. The opinions I have expressed are my own. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255