Lady Camilla is the middle Worth daughter. She elected as a 15-year-old girl to go to live with her uncle when her father killed himself. In punishment for not staying instead with the rest of the family, her sister Judith told Camilla that she was dead to them. Camilla's uncle rapidly passed her on to another relative, and poor Camilla was then passed from household to household, slowly becoming more and more of an unpaid drudge. The household Camilla starts this story in is headed by a hateful rector who makes her work for half wages and convinces her to change her last name in order to not disgrace her family. The rector abruptly forces Camilla to marry a stranger at gunpoint.

Adrian Hunter is the nephew of a duke who is unacknowledged because he is half black. His uncle, the Bishop of Gainshire, coerces Adrian into spying on a rival bishop by dangling the promise of familial acceptance in front of Adrian. In his role as a fake valet for the other bishop, Adrian is forced into this shotgun wedding with Camilla. Marriages of convenience that turn into true love are one of my favorite historical tropes. But there are so many things that mar my enjoyment of this story.

First and foremost is the fact that I don't particularly care for either of the main characters. Camilla is such a relentlessly hopeful person, and it really annoys me. She deliberately looks at a poor situation and decides that she will choose the hopeful outlook. That should be a good thing, right?! Somehow, it's simply annoying to me. And Adrian, continuing to choose to hope that his uncle will stop being racist and acknowledge him. How is he so willfully blind?! These two sweet and optimistic characters also definitely don't embody the opposites attract theory, so some of the book tension is dissipated. The main tension is provided from Adrian adamantly assuming they will get an annulment if they remain chaste, and Camilla wanting to seduce Adrian in order to turn their white marriage into a true communion of souls and bodies.

I feel badly that I don't like AFTER THE WEDDING very much. I really respect Courtney Milan as a person. I like her activism. I like her points of view about current events. I know some of the horrible story of what happened to the author in her life under her real name while clerking for a federal judge. I know she folded some of her life experiences into this book, and knowing how much I support and empathize with her situation, it stymies me that I don't love this book. I feel guilty typing that sentence right now, actually. There are so many sentences describing how the characters think--things that are progressive, that are healing, that are self-affirming--things that resonate with me in regards to my personal beliefs. Yet Milan's AFTER THE WEDDING simply does not resonate with me as a romance. Here's hoping book three will be a better fit for me.

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