The Bride Wore Size 12

Title: The Bride Wore Size 12
Author: Meg Cabot
Published: William Morrow; September 2013
Genre: Fiction, Mystery, Romance
Source: Library digital loan
From Goodreads:

"Heather Wells is used to having her cake and eating it too, but this time her cake just might be cooked. Her wedding cake, that is.

With her upcoming nuptials to PI Cooper Cartwright only weeks away, Heather's already stressed. And when a pretty junior turns up dead, Heather's sure things can't get worse—until every student in the dorm where she works is a possible suspect, and Heather's long-lost mother shows up.

Heather has no time for a tearful mother and bride reunion. She has a wedding to pull off and a murder to solve. Instead of wedding bells, she might be hearing wedding bullets, but she's determined to bring the bad guys to justice if it's the last thing she does . . . and this time, it just might be."

I was turned on to Meg Cabot after watching The Princess Diaries. I loved her Boy series (The Boy Next Door, Boy Meets Girl, and Every Boy's Got One) and Queen of Babble series.  They are fun, easy, quick reads and the characters are very likeable.  I read about half of the Princess Diaries series about ten years or so ago.  Meg Cabot's books are the sweet, fluffy cupcakes of the literary world.  I've also read the first two books in the Heather Wells series and liked them a lot.

This book begins about a month before Heather's wedding.  So of course, I expected Heather to be up to her ears in wedding prep.  I remember what the month before my wedding was like.  I was finishing up last minute details and double checking that everything was in place.  It was pretty much all I thought about.  There were really only a few mentions of the wedding until the end of the book, when she and Cooper finally tied the knot.

Granted, she is the assistant hall director of a dorm residence hall (nicknamed Death Dorm) at a fictional New York City college.  She's busy with making sure all the incoming freshman are settling in and keeping said freshmen's parents happy with roommate assignments.  Oh, and one of her students is a prince of a fake Middle Eastern nation.  When a RA is found dead in her room, it adds that much more to Heather's already full agenda. 

I wanted to love this book.  Since I really liked a many of Cabot's other works, I was certain that this would be along the same lines.  The first few books of this series were engaging and really fun.  I liked the idea of an adult spending the majority of her time around college students.  This book just seemed to fall flat.  I kind of feel like Cabot just wanted to finish the series up because she was tired of it.

I can't really say why this book wasn't as good as the first few in the series.  Maybe I'm the one who changed, although I still love fluffy chick-lit and a good murder mystery.  I just wasn't feeling it.  The murder mystery didn't have me reading well into the night to find out who committed the crime.  I only finished this book a few days ago and I can barely remember the details. 

Underwhelmed.  That is the best word to describe how I feel about this book.  If you are a fan of the Heather Wells series, I would recommend this just to have some closure for the series.  Otherwise, pass it by for some of Cabot's better series.

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