I Take This Man

February 26, 2007
Veteran chick lit and YA author Frankel (Hex and the Single Girl
; Fringe Girl
) delivers a kooky romp about a wedding gone very awry. Penny Bracket, a spoiled new-money Jersey girl, hates her $15,000 wedding dress, but loves her fiancé, Bram Shiraz. So when she receives an "I can't go through with it" note from Bram just before she's due to march down the aisle, she's upset. Penny's mother, Esther, couldn't be happier—Bram, she thought, never was right for Penny—but maternal rage takes over, and when she finds him packing his suitcase in his hotel room, she knocks him out with a champagne bottle and whisks his unconscious body to a hidden room in her mansion. While Penny tries to mend her broken heart by shopping with best friend Vita, Bram's father, Keith, gets hot on Esther's tail—er, trail—as he searches for Bram. Esther's attraction to Keith thaws her icy heart for the first time since the long-ago mysterious death of her cheating husband, Russell. Secrets are revealed, heads are cracked, and protection orders are issued as Keith realizes Esther kidnapped his son, and Penny learns the reason Bram left her. A too-swift and confusing climax gives way to a haltingly fluffy ending. Frankel's latest is clumsily over-the-top yet insubstantial.

April 1, 2007
In this latest novel from Frankel ("The Accidental Virgin"), Penny Bracket is literally minutes away from walking down the aisle with Bram Shiraz in a lavish ceremony. But then a hastily scrawled note from Bram arrives informing her that he cannot go through with the nuptials. Penny is understandably dazed, but Esther, Penny's mother, is not just angryshe's dangerously (murderously?) furious at Bram. The jilted mother-in-law marches straight to Bram's hotel room, hits him upside the head with a bottle of champagne, makes away with his unconscious body in a laundry cart, and then installs the errant groom in a locked room on the third floor of her Jersey mansion. As if this setup weren't complicated enough, Esther falls hard for Bram's single father, Keithbut it's a little awkward having an affair with a man when your mother has just locked up his son in the attic. Frankel tries for a darkly comic tone, but the whole enterprise is overpopulated with story lines and random characters. Recommended only for public libraries with established Frankel readers. [To be released simultaneously in America and England.Ed.]Andrea Y. Griffith, Loma Linda Univ. Libs., CA

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