Book Review: The Wedding Shake-Up

Title: The Wedding Shake-up
Author: J.J. Knight
Genre: Romance, Humor

What It’s About: Tillie is worried about going barefoot at her sister’s, Ensley’s, wedding in La Jarra. She had told Ensley that beach weddings are a nightmare. She notices a crab in the sand and also notices that Drew’s mom notices the crab. As evening falls, more crabs show up and Tillie’s sister, Lila shrieks, causing chaos to ensue and some crabs run towards them. Garret, Tillie’s only brother, grabs a chair and tries to smash one of the crabs, when a local starts screaming that the crabs are more scared of them than they are scared of the crabs, and that they are females with egg sacs. The man starts ferrying them out of the scene and the wedding resumes.

Tillie goes to thank the man, and they get into an argument, with him saying that tourists should not be here, or having weddings at the beach. She heads over to the reception and the man heads back to his beachside bar, where Mendo, his friend says that he has seen what occurred. He starts telling a story in Gabe’s bar about Gabe meeting a beautiful raven-haired woman–clearly basing it off of the lady on the beach, and upselling one of his own tours and also a secret drink on Gabe’s menu–the mermaid sunrise.

After the wedding and the reception, Tillie is too wide awake so she heads down to the bar on the beach, thinking that the man will be gone. Except he is there, and one of the patrons asks for a mermaid sunrise. She watches how Gabe layers the drinks, curious to see how he does it because she knows that it isn’t easy as a bartender, herself. She makes a comment that the spoon is too easy and basic, and that she does this with cherries. So Gabe hands her cherries, and specifically the ones with stems, when she asks for them. Tillie demonstrates how she layers. They trade barbs and get into an agreement that they will have a booze brawl the next day at the hug. They will have three drinks for presentation, taste, and surprise, according to Mendo, and Tillie agrees to meet with Gabe to go over any thing that she needs tomorrow morning before the brawl so that they can go ahead and buy what she needs. The winner will boss the other around for a whole night. Mendo tells Gabe that he will send judges for him.

The next morning, Tillie goes snorkeling with her brother, and meets Gabe at the bar afterwards. They go through his liquor and head out on his motorbike to the liquor store, where the owner points out the flyer Mendo made naming Tillie a “Georgia hottie drinkslinger bartender.” They buy the liquor they need and then Gabe takes Tillie to the market, where too late he realizes that his mom is selling candles. She follows them, calls him by his full name, Gabriel Adam Landers, and invites Tillie to her candle stand. In the meantime, ,he comes across his friend, Anya, who asks him if there’s any coincidence that Tillie is from the same place as Anita. Someone else asks him about Anita–Bodeen and Peter, both of whom are preparing coconuts that Gabe and Tillie will use in their 3rd drink, when Tillie returns. She asks him about Anita, but he shrugs it off.

Later on, during the brawl, there is a huge crowd and Tillie sees Lila and her niece–Rosie–at the back. Gabe sees his mom and her friend. They both have fun with making the drinks, talking smack against each other, but also supporting one another. At the end, Tillie makes a strawberry-banana cocktail in the coconut shell and as Gabe is helping her, they kiss. The crowd goes wild because they have already played off the tension between them earlier. They make a lot of drinks and quite a bit of money.

Tillie and Gabe begin to hang out for the eleven remaining days that she has of vacation. They see and feed rays off the bay with Mendo’s tour, and make out with each other on the boat. They take the Kayaks out to a secluded area, where they have sex in the water while fully naked. The next day, she is severely sunburned, and Gabe picks her up to hide her from Lila. He takes care of her sunburns and they nap together before she helps him out at the bar. They go on a date with all of his friends, and she tells the story of how they met, and Gabe realizes that she may have been deathly afraid of crabs at the wedding. It’s the first time she tries Swanky–a La Jarra lemonade tea type non-alcoholic drink.

Tillie asks Gabe if he tried to include that on his menu as tourists would want something local. The next day, he experiments a little while he waits for Tillie. She tests a few when she comes back and comes up with a name for it–Swanky Panky. Of course, the tourists want to try it and they absolutely love it. At one point, she even suggests that they do something a little high-end considering the location of the bar is near the wealthy tourist condos. So they start a rotating menu of special drinks.

Gabe takes her out once to an expensive lunch place and she does not want to order the most expensive thing on the menu because of her upbringing but she doesn’t tell Gabe that. He tells her that he does not mind, and orders the item for himself, though she does end up eating it.

Tillie goes on a kayak ride at night for the bioluminescence and realizes that Ensley is different–she’s more relaxed now that she’s married and taken care of. Ensley also realizes something is different about Tillie and Tillie lets slip that she is seeing someone.

After dinner one night, Tillie brings her family over to the bar and Gabe sees that Ensley is not willing to be convinced by him. Tillie asks him to make the mermaid sunrise for Ensley, but Ensley ask for a Blue Hawaiian. Tillie tells him the ingredients and when Gabe tries to confirm that it’s a Blue Hawaii that Ensley wants, Ensley snaps at him that Tillie knows her drinks. Seeing his confusion, Tillie tells him that it is a blue Hawaii as she goes to make it. Ensley ends up drinking the Mermaid Sunrise, and then makes a face that the Blue Hawaiian doesn’t taste right, to which Tillie responds that she needs a palate cleanser as the Mermaid Sunrise is sweet. Ensley is too tipsy to do much else, so Drew takes her to the condo where Lila and Tillie are staying with Rosie, and Tillie apologizes to Gabe about the Blue Hawaii, saying that she’s never corrected Ensley when she called it Blue Hawaiian. Throughout the event, Tillie seemed to be saying that nothing will happen and that they don’t mean much to each other, which hurts Gabe because for the first time in his life, he can clearly see his future with her–something he has never done with any of his one night stands. But once her family is gone, it seems like Tillie is content to be there with him. He does apologize to her for having her work on her time off, but she tells him that she enjoys it.

The next day as Ensley is packing, she tells Tillie to break it off because nothing good can basically come of it as it is a vacation spot and then what will happen? She does not want Lila to be flying back home with a crying baby and a crying Tillie because she’s gotten her heart broken for the first time in her life. Tillie decides to wean herself off from Gabe and when she doesn’t text all ay, he asks her if they are over, to which she says that they should wean themselves off sooner. She goes to see him later anyways, and says that they should just enjoy the time they have. She knows that this is absolutely different than all of her other flings.

Gabe talks to his mom about things and his mom can tell he is a bit broken up about Tillie leaving. She tells him to go to Atlanta to see Tillie and find Anita. So he tells Tillie this, and at first, Tillie wonders if he loves Anita, to which he responds that Anita is his birth mother, who abandoned him on La Jarra after giving birth to him and nursing him. She was originally from Georgia and had arrived in La Jarra already pregnant. Tillie reveals to him that her dad had been pretty absent her whole life and convinces him to at least talk to Anita.

They plan out his visit to Georgia while bartending together. And when it is time for Tillie to leave, Lila demands that she stay at home to help her on their last night. Tillie helps around the house and after taking out the trash, she goes to the bar where she writes a message in the sand for Gabe. They then leave, and while waiting to return the car, they get the message that their flight was delayed by two hours. So Lila drops Tillie off at the bar, and she and Gabe run into each other’s arms. She confesses that he means a lot to her.

Two days later, Gabe leaves his bar in the hands of his friends and his mother, and flies to Miami and then on to Atlanta, where he is reunited with Tillie. After they check him in, they go to Tillie’s bar, and at one point she’s short staffed, so Gabe jumps in and helps out, slinking away from the bar before Tillie’s boss finds out he was working there. The boss is confused by the amount of drinks sold though.

They do find Anita at the cafe that she posts about on Facebook, and she tells them the truth. She had gotten rebellious because of her upbringing and the arguments between her mom and stepdad. She joined a strip club where she ended up meeting Donahue Fitzgerald, at a concert after work. He took a liking to her and they started spending a lot of time together–she drank a lot but Donahue did drugs. He was a talented drummer but got kicked out of bands often. One time, he had found out about the work on La Jarra, saying that he would find bands to play for there. So they applied for visas, and she paid for the flights.

Then on the day that they were supposed to leave, she found Donahue gone. She went to La Jarra because she had nothing else lined up and waitressed there. Then, she went back to stripping and many of the men on the island were into her, causing strain between her and all the women. She gave birth to Gabe in La Jarra, only supported by a kindly volunteer, and nursed him, but the lactation consultant and post childbirth counselor was a woman whose man had a thing going on with Anita, that the woman made her whole experience unpleasant. So Anita left him, because she had no one to help and support her on the island. She tells him that she doesn’t know what happened to Donahue and he doesn’t know about Gabe at all. He tells her that Taralynn, the volunteer adopted him and so he didn’t have her last name, when she said that she searched for him on google.

Afterwards, he and Tillie go for a walk and he ruminates on the whole thing, admitting that he felt angry at some point, but then when he got a hug from Anita, he felt like he knew her somehow. They spend the remaining week hanging out around town and even at work. On their last night together, Tillie sleeps over the night at his place, saying that last time their last night together was taken away but not this time. They both try to figure out how to make the relationship work, but Tillie cannot leave Lila and Rosie, and she cannot imagine Gabe working in a dumpster bar–he belongs at the beach. The only other option is to marry, which she isn’t ready for.

When Gabe comes home, he talks to his mom and tells her how it all went down with Anita. She is also curious about what he will do about his relationship with Tillie, and when he says that there’s nothing he can do, she tells him that things that are meant to be, will find a way to happen. In the meantime, Tillie is depressed and on her sister’s evening, she ends up crying, heartbroken about it all.

A few days later, she texts Gabe and he tells her that a hurricane is coming their way, so he may lose connection for a little while, but assures her that he will be fine. Tillie freaks out and talks out loud in front of Lila, who gets upset with her not because she’s jealous but because it looks like Tillie will abandon them too, and she cannot manage on her own. But Tillie promises her that she is not abandoning her; rather, she wants to figure it out so Lila can be with her. But she realizes that she would much rather weather the storms with Gabe than be apart. She text him that and he tells her that he feels the same way.

Gabe finally comes out to survey the damage after the hurricane. En route to his bar, he gets intercepted by the manager of the condo, who tells him to give them the insurance information and they will pay it out. His whole bar is gone, and the manager tells him that they won’t be rebuilding it because the condo owner does not want to have a bar on premises.

Gabe tells Tillie that and that he will be working at a new bar that his friend is opening. He invites her to join and being planning it. Tillie tells Lila the plan a little while later–that they both would have jobs at the hotel/bar and that Gabe’s mom would be more than happy to babysit Rosie. Lila tells her that ever since the night of the hurricane, she has been putting her own plan into action-with Ensley’s assistance, she is going to get a job in the bank and start working there. She tells Tillie that she realizes it is time to grow up and take care of herself and Rosie and not rely on her sisters for everything.

Six months later, Tillie is working with Gabe at the upscale bar in La Jarra and as they are closing, Gabe realizes that he misses his old bar– an idea forms in his head but he needs to do the math.

A year later, Gabe and Tillie open up their own bar by the beach–and they will serve limited food options. Gabe seems nervous at the opening, and then Tillie notices Taralynn coming with Anita–whom they had seen in Georgia a couple of times, and Gabe continues to correspond with her. At the opening, he makes a speech and proposes to Tillie–she says yes.

My Thoughts: This one was just as cute as the Ensley and Drew’s story, but it was definitely way different. I do think that Ensley’s and Drew’s story was much lighter, while this one dived into some difficult topics on Gabe’s side. Still, it was a cute, feel-good love story that develops over a vacation, and about navigating a long-distance relationship, where both people realize that they’d rather be together to weather the storms. I would recommend this if you want something to read this summer (along with the first book in the series) that is fast, easy, and fun!