| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 92.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Cinderella Dreams: The Allure of the Lavish Wedding. By Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. xvi, 384 pp. Cloth, $50.00, ISBN 0-520-23661-0. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-520-24008-1.)

Nearly two decades ago, one of my relatives and her fiancé both worked two jobs for three years to pay for a spectacular wedding and reception. Their marriage lasted six months. I found the situation impossible to understand; it would have been a puzzle even if their marriage had been longer-lived. For everyone who wonders why couples (and/or their parents) are willing to shoulder enormous financial burdens for a one-day extravaganza and why they believe that an opulent wedding is an entitlement, Cele C. Otnes and Elizabeth H. Pleck provide the answers. "People want lavish weddings," Otnes and Pleck argue, "because they want to experience magic in their lives" (p. 12, emphasis in original). Cinderella Dreams, a collaboration between a historian and a professor of business, is both a history of the democratization of the extravagant wedding in the United States and an analysis of its increasingly global appeal.

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