Name: Here Comes the Bride
ISBN: 9780887768989

Beatrice Masini

Filomena the seamstress is known throughout the town for her elegant wedding gowns, but when shy Rusty proposes, she decides to make her own wedding dress extra fancy.

Here Comes the Bride

Maggie Gordon

Here Comes the Bride frustrated me. I thought it was going to be a story about avoiding the ridiculous demands of a wedding and making sure one remembered the love that was supposed to go into the day. Instead, it was more a lazy critique against women for caring about supposedly frivolous things. Filomena is a seamstress and she's dreamed of making herself a wedding dress. When her beloved neighbour proposes, she's so excited to create the dress of her dreams that she gets a bit wrapped up in her work. She decides not to go out on a date with her beloved because she is working on her dress. But this narrative does not point to a crazy bridezilla, but a woman of skill wanting to create something for herself. Being a bit wrapped up in work and not wanting to go out once is not a sign that she's forgotten the love that founds her soon-to-be marriage.

On the day of the wedding, Filomena walks into the church in a beautiful, huge gown. Her fiance freaks out because men are scared of tulle or something, and he flees (specifically, he says she can't fit on his scooter...). Yes, the groom flees because Filomena's dress is too amazing? Unfortunately, Filomena doesn't realise this dude deserves to be kicked to the curb for RUNNING AWAY FROM A DRESS. She runs after him, losing pieces of her hard work. In the end, she marries him happily in a white shift.

Ugg... While I do think that there is a HORRIBLE tendency of people to go overboard with weddings (often because of pressure from other people), women are allowed to care about things like dresses. Just because it's fashion, doesn't mean it is valueless, and it seems odd to feature a SEAMSTRESS getting yelled at for making a beautiful gown. The only thing she does wrong is spend "too much time" on the dress (which is not just a personal desire, but probably a good piece of business branding as well!). The book critiques traditional expressions of femininity quite hard, but before any true harm from these actions was shown. Whatever book, her dress was pretty. 

A plus was that the art was super cool, but even that couldn't save this book from its flaws.