Book Review: Your Temple Wedding, Not a Cover-to-Cover Read

Your Temple Wedding: A Guide to Planning, Preparing and Celebrating Your Special Day by Jeri-Lynn Johnson and Amy Jones. Published in 2007 by Leatherwood Press, 128 pages. Retail price: $16.95. ISBN: 978-1-59992-060-3.

A recent LDS wedding planning guide is always in demand. In their attractive new book, Your Temple Wedding, Jeri-Lynn Johnson and Amy Jones give great ideas for current wedding venues and resources. Their planning guide is appealing and helpful, but, due to its complicated organization, difficult to manage cover-to-cover.

Flipping through Your Temple Wedding for the first time, what caught my eye were the color photograph pages with ideas on flowers, reception set-ups, dresses, cakes, refreshments, and photography. Matching these photographs, the best part of the book is the reception chapter. The authors’ ideas on choosing a reception site and all things about the reception are very practical and informative. The other chapter I particularly enjoyed was “The Temple Wedding,” a great run-down on temple protocol, expectations and requirements, what a temple wedding day is like, and suggestions for spiritual temple preparation.

Your Temple Wedding’s greatest weakness is its organization. Based on the simple, appealing cover, I expected the book to be effectively organized for a prospective bride. With a temple wedding as its theme, I also expected “The Temple Wedding” to be the highlight of the book. Instead, I found that Your Temple Wedding is cumbered with enormous task lists that make it sound like every wedding idea ever thought of is a necessity. For example, the first thing a bride needs to hear when she becomes engaged is not all the difficult topics to discuss with her fiancé (page 13) or that she must have a good wedding coordinator, videographer, and live band.

In their introduction to Your Temple Wedding, the authors state, “This book is designed to provide you with options” (page 9). Perhaps the authors meant this statement to be a disclaimer that means that not everything they suggest in the book is important, but I disagree with many of the authors’ suggestions. For example, choosing a style and a theme for your wedding shouldn’t be the second thing you do after you get engaged, your wedding doesn’t have to cost at least $10,000, and what you really should do “before you begin” is remember the covenants that you are planning to make.

Your Temple Wedding’s saving grace, in terms of organization, is its index. A lot of the information in the book is helpful, even though most of it isn’t anything that most people haven’t heard before, but the organization of the book is poor. The book gives some good modern ideas about websites and other current venues, but overall its resource list is limited. Unfortunately, I have never found the perfect temple wedding planning book. Your Temple Wedding is not perfect, but is a new and current book, just make sure you use the index rather than reading it cover-to-cover.