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The Guest List By Lucy Foley
Three Stars — Good storyline, but left much to be desired.
The Guest List by Lucy Foley has been on my list for a while and it’s one I constantly see being recommended on various platforms. It’s a New York Times bestseller and many readers have compared it to the famous Agatha Christie novels.
Given this, I had high hopes for this book and was excited to start it. I don't want to say I was disappointed because the storyline did deliver in terms of a few crazy plot twists, but for most of the book, I was underwhelmed.
The Guest List tells a story of a wedding that takes place on an island off the coast of Ireland. This isn’t just any island though, this island is supposedly haunted and many of the wedding-goers suspect as much throughout the night.
Jules has high hopes though of course, she wants this wedding to be everything she dreamed of and more. She and Will, her soon-to-be husband are both high profile people: Will a rising TV star, and Jules a magazine publisher. A seemingly perfect couple. But does Jules really know who she’s marrying?
Throughout the wedding weekend, she can’t seem to get a note out of her head. Someone, a person she knows, dropped a note in her mailslot one day: a warning not to marry Will.
As the story is told, the reader is left wondering, along with Jules, who was it? Who doesn’t think Jules should marry Will and why?
The weekend unfolds before our eyes and through each chapter, we learn more and more about the characters and their pasts. As we read of the days and hours leading up to the ceremony, every few chapters we are taken back to the present, the current happenings during the ceremony told by the narrator: a waitress has found a body.
Who turns up dead? And more importantly, what happened? Is there a murderer here on the island?
The Guest List is written from seven different perspectives and each chapter provides more and more insight into who each person is:
- Narrator — the present, the body
- Jules — the bride
- Olivia — bridesmaid, half-sister of the bride
- Hannah — the plus-one
