This first story featured the developing relationship between wedding photographer Mackensie "Mac" Elliot and English professor Carter Maguire.

Like several other Roberts novels, Vision in White explored how a protagonist balanced a successful career with a dysfunctional family environment.

[5] The novel follows the relationship of photographer Mackensie "Mac" Elliot and English teacher[discuss] Carter Maguire.

Mac and her childhood friends Parker, Emma, and Laurel are the founders of Vows, a fictional wedding planning company in Connecticut.

While accompanying his sister to a planning session at Vows, Carter renews his acquaintance with Mac and confesses that he had been infatuated with her since high school.

[6] A similar theme is seen in several of Roberts' other works; her In Death series, written as J. D. Robb, has a heroine who has created a family from female friends and colleagues.

[9] After seeing her mother divorce four husbands and discard countless boyfriends, Mac prefers to avoid emotional intimacy rather than risk the relationship splintering.

[11] Critic Mary Ellen Snodgrass calls Vision in White a story of the New Woman, with a strong heroine who is extremely proud of her significant career accomplishments.

[12] Roberts uses the heroine's choices of how to pose or spotlight her photography clients as pointed ways of celebrating both monogamy and "unconventional views of femininity".

[13] In one scene, Mac convinces a heavily pregnant woman to pose nude, despite her feelings of awkwardness; through the resulting photos, the client comes to believe that she is actually beautiful.

[10][13] In another poke at traditional stereotypes, Mac photographs a bride and groom posing together on a horse, evoking the metaphor of a knight coming to rescue the princess—but the couple are equals.

Roberts' treatment of these themes "validates the dress-up game of playing bride as both fantasy and a stabilizing preface on women's devotion to mate and family".

[12] Roberts included significant detail on the wedding planning industry, which Snodgrass posits is meant to highlight and celebrate the success the female characters had at niche marketing.

[4] A Publishers Weekly review highlighted the "gentle humor and likable cast" and predicted that readers would be eager to follow the characters through the rest of the series.

Many were delighted to see Roberts return to traditional contemporary romances, minus the elements of fantasy and magic that had woven through her more recent novels.

Some praised the tight bonds of sisterhood that Roberts created for the four founders of Vows, but other readers complained that the character voices were too similar.