The Marriage Contract

Eh. A vast wave of misunderstandings, and stupid actions. We-the-readers know more of Nick's motivations than Clair does - stretching it, I can see that at least some of her actions make sense if she didn't know what Nick was doing or why. But since we do know, she comes off as unnaturally stubborn and contrary, and mean to this nice guy. Who does some things that are extremely stupid, and compounds them by not admitting them until he's forced to - which Clair also does, hiding things unnecessarily. They had a shared bad background - Nick's father screwed up both their lives, and his mother continued to do so - but even that didn't excuse them, to me. And annoyingly, the book jumps from the semi-forced marriage proposal and acceptance show more to the wedding - they talk, a little, about what they've been doing and what people's reactions to the engagement were, but since (to my mind) the problems could have been solved preemptively by them talking to each other during that time, the author skipped it so as to keep the book going. Which meant that all their problems were by author fiat, which annoys me at the best of times. Not terrible - I did finish it - but not a winner, and definitely not worth rereading. show less