The Wedding Season

by Katy Birchall

Matthew-the-loser dumps Freya practically at the altar, leaving the heroine to endure a season of weddings on her own. However will she manage?

Cute cover though, right? Paid Link

I’ll come clean and first tell you that this was a DNF for me around 35%. Without having reached the midpoint or the end, I’m not the most trustworthy reviewer, but here I am, being transparent about that.

Here’s what I do know. Freya gets dumped in a broom closet at the wedding venue. She fixates on the whereabouts of the hired peacocks and eventually slinks away to nurse her wounds.

Later, as in much later, Freya’s friends concoct a series of challenges to keep her distracted for the following seven weddings she must attend this season—solo. Why Freya doesn’t set herself up with a plus-one, say a friend, we’ll never know. But she accepts the deal and off she goes, which occurs waaaay too late in the book. This drags down the pacing of the first third of the book considerably, which is filled with pining, wallowing, and not moving on as quickly as this reader would have liked. I almost put it down several times, but I did want to see how those little challenges were going to go, so I hung in there.

At the first wedding, Freya doesn’t follow written directions and enters an out-of-order bathroom. Once inside—surprise!—she gets locked in. I admit that bit was sort of funny. I thought perhaps the handsome and strong vicar who frees Freya, might develop into the unexpected love interest. But, no. You can see that I applied my romance-colored-glasses to the plot structure here and it didn’t work. That should have been a note to myself—this story is not a romance. (TBH, I scoured goodreads and confirmed that yes, this one’s light fiction, and no, the romance plot “beats” weren’t happening.)

In terms of character development, Freya goes on and on—thus affecting the plotting—internalizing over Matthew far into the book. To be fair to Freya character, they were together for a long time. However, if this book is a light, rollicking tale about weddings, then get us to the church on time! Please! I stopped reading this at about 35%, at which point she’d just reached out to her ex’s mom because she missed her. Ug. It was so awkward, and not in an endearing way.

When we meet the *maybe* love interest, he’s hung over and naps in her car while Freya gives him a ride to her second solo wedding. He skips over the niceties that would endear him to the reader, and, like, show that he’s a decent human being. For starters, he’s not awake when she arrives at his house. He makes her wait. Then he’s so hung over he naps in her car. He does not offer to drive, or buy her her snacks and beverages of her choice, or even stuff gas money in her hands/purse/glove compartment (or whatever they call that in the UK), despite her protests. All of that would have been classy, and he was frankly red-flaggy, a person to avoid. As a reader, there was no way to walk him back after that if his baseline is so clueless and self-absorbed.

This one didn’t sparkle for me.

Photo by dylan nolte on Unsplash

Off to find those darned peacocks…