Maggie Shipstead is a smooth and artful writer. Her entertaining debut novel, Seating Arrangements, had me transfixed. It begins in the father-of-the bride's voice and ends in his voice, but throughout the weekend of the wedding we get to be inside most of the characters' heads.
page 12: Makeup pencils and brushes were everywhere, abandoned helter-skelter as though by the fleeing beauticians of Pompeii.
page 38: The few times both sets of parents came together for dinners in Cambridge they had all bravely skated the hours away on a thin crust of chitchat.
page 93: Silence over stockings -- the first regret of his marriage.
page 113: Love was just one more thing that would make it difficult to die.
page 183: Female friendship was one-tenth prevention and nine-tenths cleanup. Livia would do what she wanted. The sad-girl hormones would bind her to another man who didn't want her, and when Sterling sloughed her off, Dominique would be called upon to indulge her defense mechanisms, tell her that of course there was some complilcated reason he would not allow himself to open up to her, of course he knew she was too good for him (no man ever thought that -- it went against natural selection), of course he was afraid of getting hurt.
