Product Description

Brenda has had a long and eventful life, and she has come to Whitby to run a B&B and enjoy some peace and quiet. She and her best friend Effie like nothing better than going out for tea and keeping their eyes open for mysterious goings on in town.

And what with satanic beauty salons, roving psychic investigators and the frankly terrifying owner of the Christmas Hotel there's plenty to watch. But the oddest thing in Whitby may well be Brenda herself. With her terrible scars, her strange lack of a surname and the fact that she takes two different shoe sizes, Brenda should know that people as, well, unique as she is just aren't destined for a quiet life.

---

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #50233 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Shena MacKay
A brilliant extravaganza, gripping, ingeniously plotted, and
tragically funny, with unforgettable characters.

Review

'Utterly original. I was totally charmed'

(The Times )

'Without doubt, Never The Bride will be a Gothic smash'

(Guardian )

‘It is wonderful, I love it and really hope there will be sequels starring Brenda, whom I love to bits' (Jill Mansell )

‘This is a quirky, whimsical, episodic novel that combines perversity, situation comedy and quietly lush moments of poetry’

(Time Out )

About the Author
Paul Magrs was born in the North East of England. After seven years at the University of East Anglia teaching English Literature and Creative Writing, he now lives in Manchester and lectures half-time at the Manchester Metropolitan University.

---

Customer Reviews

Fantastic fun!
Brenda lives in Whitby and runs a B and B. She lives next door to her best friend Effie who owns a junk shop full of magical books. Together they get into a whole bunch of adventures, including going to a macabre beauty parlour called the Deadly Boutique, appearing on a psychic TV programme, assisting in helping aliens to flee their home, and get involved in a mystery as to some missing Christmas Elves. And just who is Mr Alucard?

Brenda herself has no surname, is covered in scars, wears a wig and has an odd pair of hands (one being much bigger than the other). She has had a long, long, long and eventful life and she has come to Whitby to run a B&B in search of some peace and quiet. Just who is she and where did she come from?

A terrific book that's full of humour. The reader will recognise aspects of several gothic greats such as Frankenstein, Sweeney Todd, War of the Worlds and, of course, Dracula. Particularly recommended for fans of Gregory Maguire or Jasper Fforde, but anyone with a wicked sense of humour will love this great tale.

Never the bride
The setting of Whitby, the town that that inspired Bram Stoker, is perfect for this book as it provides the gothic setting for a story that includes vampires, witches, aliens and more. Even the protaganist is not what she sees-who or what is Brenda?
The ending suggests a sequel and I hope there will be one.

Charming, unique, utterly goth. More, please!
If Tim Burton ever makes a book into TV show, this would be a fantastic choice. It's a quirky, whimsical fantasy which draws heavily from the `classic horror' genre. Our heroine is a sort of patchwork Miss Marple with a terrible past. In Whitby (of course it would be Whitby), she owns a B&B and stumbles onto one monstrous villain after another. The main character and her witchy neighbour/best friend are endearingly spooky/crabby old ladies, and I enjoyed their adventures a great deal. The setting is a sort of alternate reality in which many of the classic sci-fi and horror stories such as War of the Worlds and Dracula actually happened, yet most facets of modern life remain unchanged. There's a lot of scope in that for future plots!

Each chapter has a sort of episodic feel, yet none of the plot lines is completely resolved by the end--we're left a bit wanting. This ending is the reason I'm giving it 4 stars--one of the plot devices was a tiny bit derivative of Buffy, which I found a bit disappointing, and none of the mysteries that we saw along the way was worked out completely satisfactorily.

Still, the fact that we are left hanging means that we'll get to read more about our two supernatural old dears, and so I'm already excitedly awaiting the next book! I would recommend this book to fans of Charlaine Harris, M.C. Beaton, Gregory Maguire, or Jasper Fforde.