Sister of the Bride

infobox Book
name = Sister of the Bride


image_caption = Cover of Sister of the Bride
author = Beverly Cleary
cover_artist =
country = United States
language = English
series =
genre = Novel
publisher =
release_date = 1963
media_type =
pages =
isbn =
preceded_by =
followed_by =

"Sister of the Bride" is a 1963 YA novel by Beverly Cleary.

Plot

The plot revolves around sixteen-year-old Barbara MacLane, a girl grappling with disappointing romantic prospects, her worries about not being accepted into the University of California, Berkeley, and the fact that she will never catch up to her sister, Rosemary, who is two years older (and a student at Berkeley).

Barbara's feeling of being left in the dust by her sister only intensifies when Rosemary calls home and announces quite suddenly that she is getting married, to her college sweetheart Greg. Although this news comes as an unexpected and less-than-pleasant shock to their parents, Barbara becomes enthralled with the romantic details of the wedding, and promptly decides that if she is to be caught up to Rosemary in two years, she needs to step up her search for a boyfriend. Her two potential prospects are Tootie Bodger, a tall and rather gloomy trombone player who is more fond of Barbara than she is of him, and Bill Cunningham, a good-looking classmate with a Vespa whom Barbara woos with homemade cookies (this somewhat misfires, as he comes to think of her as "domestic" and tries to get her to mend a shirt he ripped). Tootie is presented as plodding yet thoughtful, while Bill is conversely dashing but thoughtless.

However, as the stresses of Rosemary's wedding begin to pile up (tension between the lower-middle-class MacLanes and Greg's wealthy parents; the cost of the wedding and the short time frame granted to plan it in; and the sacrifices Rosemary and Greg must make, such as becoming landlords of a dumpy tenement to save on rent), Barbara begins to think that marrying young is perhaps not for her after all.

At Rosemary's wedding, the sisters' elderly grandmother offers Barbara a bit of advice: "Have a good time while you are young," which Barbara apparently means to follow. At the end of the book, she has not decided which potential beau she prefers, but thinks that "it was going to be fun to find out."