The muted, romantic photograph of a dancing bride and groom on the cover of A. Manette Ansay's Midnight Champagne belies the character-driven, unsentimental novel within. April and Caleb, who have known each other for all of three months, have surprised their families by planning a Valentine's Day wedding in a chapel and hotel converted from a notorious and possibly haunted whorehouse. That premise serves as only a sample of the juxtapositions Ansay piles on—romance and sex, history and the present, innocence and violence—as the novel progresses through the events of a disastrous day. Ansay, whose novel River Angel encompassed the thoughts of an entire town, wisely decided not to place the focus on the (possibly) happy couple, instead distributing it among more than two dozen distinct characters connected with the wedding. Each confers some judgement about the hasty engagement and the ceremony that meets no one's expectations, and, of course, each judgement is reflective of those characters' own experiences and scars. Although there is plenty of quirkiness to be found here, Ansay also avoids the lazy temptation of defining characters by their quirks, as comic ensemble fiction often does. Instead, the characters are sharply and elegantly defined through a roaming stream of consciousness that emphasizes the sometimes-tenuous ties connecting those who profess to love each other; the jokes are both hilarious and painful as they rise out of believable misunderstandings and miscommunications. Happily, the central relationship between the newlyweds remains too complex for any sort of final judgment. In the world of Midnight Champagne, there are no certainties, only fleeting moments of conviction and, occasionally, joy.