The world after Alice A novel

A surprise wedding in Maine resurrects emotional wounds and reveals the messy dynamics among two families in this tender, affecting debut. While their forthcoming nuptials should be cause for happy celebration, Benji and Morgan are apprehensive about revealing their relationship to those closest to them. Twelve years prior, Alice, Benji's sister and Morgan's best friend, died by suicide, causing emotional fallout that reverberates to the present day. As their families come together, the delicate equilibrium they have all been holding on to seems likely to unravel. It seems that everyone is hiding something: the groom's father is hiding his unemployment, the father of the bride harbors a crush on the groom's mother, and a newcomer to the family is reluctant to share his own connection to Alice. Told over the course of the wedding weekend and in flashbacks to the weeks surrounding Alice's death, this character-driven story will please readers who appreciate astute observations about human behavior and messy family dramas like Seating Arrangements, by Maggie Shipstead.

Upper-crust New York families collide after the loss of a promising young violinist. Brooklynites Morgan Hensley and Benjamin Weil are getting married. They've waited until the last moment possible to reveal their relationship to their families, giving everyone just enough notice to gather in Maine for the nuptials. The Weils and the Hensleys are not meeting for the first time for this happy occasion--they have history. What the two families share is Alice Weil, an elite classical musician who was Benji's sister and Morgan's best friend, who jumped off a bridge 12 years earlier, her body never located. Green shows the group in their fraught, damaged present--at the couple's rehearsal dinner, the wedding ceremony--to highlight the awful fireworks among family members. There's Benji's divorced Upper West Side parents: laid-off businessman Nick, whose younger wife and new daughter have not been able to dispel his ghosts, and failed ballerina Linnie, whose new philosophy teacher partner knows more about her past than she realizes. Meanwhile, Morgan's father, an acclaimed pediatric surgeon, carries a torch for Linnie. Lest readers presume that grief has transformed these people into shells of their former selves, though, Green intersperses the present action with glimpses into the past--Alice's memorial service, the lead-up to her jump, the dissolution of Nick and Linnie's marriage--to show the same uncomfortable interactions germinating that will play out on a large scale later. This could all make for salacious, fun reading, as these are deeply unpleasant people who spend years bickering with each other, but instead the novel is mostly dreary and Green's prose is weighed down by a curious formality ("The words shattered the concupiscent undercurrent of his thoughts," Green writes of Nick during a confrontation with Linnie). Like left-out wedding champagne: expensive, bitter, and a bit flat. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.