On the way to the wedding

Having read very very quickly through this entire eight book series I went into On the Way to the Wedding not really expecting much! A) I feel that the Bridgerton series has a fairly spotty record when it comes to Bridgerton brothers as romantic leads, and B) the immediately preceding novel starred Hyacinth, the youngest and one of the most delightful Bridgertons, and how do you follow her?!

Then there's the fact that the weakest books in the series (An Offer from a Gentleman and When He Was Wicked) featured Bridgerton siblings who, like Gregory, didn't have very much presence in the other books.

It's easy to tell which Bridgertons Quinn favors as she makes sure that they manage to turn up and do things constantly throughout the series even outside of their own POV narratives. As such, when she gets to the ones she's not bothered with that much the book suffers because you start off without any sense of them, and it seems like she takes a good chunk of the book to get a sense of them herself.

That said, this final installment surprised me because... Gregory. Is. Hilarious.

I'd initially thought that he might veer towards a diet soda version of Colin, but he's very little like Colin at all, excepting their generally mild, happy demeanors. Gregory completely lacks Colin's incisiveness and cunning (though he does have some of his spoiled immaturity) and is overflowing with extremely earnest, extremely overwrought emotion with which he has no idea what to do, generally speaking, so he just sort of bumbles around trying too hard and making messes of things.

Gregory is to put it quite simply: a human disaster. And it is endearing as fuck. That fact, and the fact that Lucy is an extremely sweet, relatable, and sympathetic character allows the book to carry its rather absurd plotline with aplomb. (Suddenly: BLACKMAIL! TREASON! SHOOT-OUTS?!?!?!)

It's ridiculous, but delightfully so. So while, it's not sending the series out on the high that would have been ending with Hyacinth and It's in His Kiss, it was definitely serviceable and firmly in the middle range of Bridgerton novels.