The Wedding Season was an enjoyable read for me, but for many reasons it wasn’t a quick read. Most of the reasons are because my personal life turned very busy quickly and I had little to no time available to read for a couple of months, but I also had to fight a bit to make myself finish the book as I found some parts a little slow.

The premise of the book is that our heroine Freya has been dumped the day before her wedding by her jerk of a fiancé and she’s supposed to be attending many weddings that summer, now single. Together with her friends they cook up a plan for the summer with wedding ‘goals’ to help getting through the season. Freyas friends and the side characters were probably my favourite part of the story, and as a recently single-person myself, it was fun and relatable to imagine having to go to a bunch of couple-related events alone.

I really really enjoyed the secret bridesmaid (Katy’s first book), and I still do like Katy’s writing and will continue to read her future books! Thanks to NetGalley for providing me with the copy to read and review!

The first kiss in this book had me swooning. What a kiss. I loved Freya and Jamie. What a match they made. I loved how the author helped us connect to Freya with the prologue and the first chapter. I liked most of this book. I loved how the wedding season had tasks to look forward to. Parts of the book felt a little slow.

3.5 stars
This cover was screaming spring and I needed to read it!
I thought this was a super cute read! I loved the support of friends and family and found that quite heartbreaking.
I think this is the perfect friendship/ romcom for this time of year!

THE WEDDING SEASON • Katy Birchall • ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Thank you to NetGalley, the author, and the publisher for an eARC in exchange for an honest review.

Brief Synopsis: Freya Scott prides herself on always having it together, but when Matthew calls it off the day before their walk down the aisle, Freya’s entire life plan goes up in smoke. Humiliated and heartbroken, she is determined to appear in control and fine. Surely, Matthew will soon realize that he’s made a huge mistake! In the meantime, Freya still has a summer of other people's weddings ahead of her. To help her survive the wedding season, her best friends concoct a series of challenging, outrageous tasks that she must complete at each event, each designed to distract her from Matthew and what might have been.

Unsurprisingly, I adored this book. The characters were likable; their antics enjoyable. Birchall again manages to paint a realistic picture of the ups and downs of relationships, highlight the importance of friendship, and all while making her reader laugh.

My takeaway from this book? Guys can really suck sometimes, but you know what? It ends up alright in the end. Surround yourself with people, try new things, love yourself as fiercely as you love others, and be ok with ending a chapter because the beginning of the next one may just be worth it. To feet!

TL;DR: Pick this book up, enjoy it by the pool, then come back to me when you understand how clever/adorable my use of the phrase "To feet!" was in this review.

Such a cute book! Who doesn’t love a wedding? So of course reading about one is so much fun! I love cute feel good books that let you escape the real world and this book does just that! It won’t disappoint!

I adored Birchall’s last book, The Secret Bridesmaid, so I couldn’t wait for this one to come out. The concept was unique and the friendships are so fun and full of British banter. Brits have a way of giving each other crap in a funny and loving way, and the friend group in this book is no exception. Freya has two best friends, Ruby and Leo, who help her come up with a list of tasks to keep her mind off her fiancé dumping her the day before their wedding. She now has to go through an entire wedding season single, and she has to complete tasks like being the last one on the dance floor, making an impromptu speech, and running naked down the hotel hallway. The outcome is hilarious and chaotic, but there is also so much growth in her over the course of the season. If you need a laugh and a mood booster, this book is for you.

I was surprised by how heartwarming this book was!

From the cover, I was expecting a funny rom-com and while it was humorous (I loved her best friends!) it was also a story about her journey after heartbreak.

I could relate to Freya’s heartbreak and her denial that Matthew was really gone. The beginning of this story is sad, but I enjoyed watching Freya’s growth and her acceptance/moving on.

I wouldn’t call this one a rom-com, but definitely worth a read!

I adore Freya! This book started with her having the worst day possible! Thankfully her two best friends, Ruby & Leo, are there to help her turn “the wedding season” into a fun challenge and help her get through what happened. Even though Freya did not want to do all the tasks Ruby and Leo told her to do at the weddings she did them. It turned out to be the perfect way for her to learn more about herself and get comfortable with who she was on her own. In addition, it opened her up to new experiences and people.

This book was great! It was about love, friendship, and growth. Such a fantastic read.

Thank you NetGalley for a copy of this book. This is my honest voluntary review.

The Wedding Season by Katy Birchall is a beautifully written first-person POV rom-com that had me smiling, laughing, and cheering the heroine on from the first page to the last. I started it curious to find out what the wedding survival guide challenges would be and completely fell in love with Birchall’s writing and characters, especially her heroine Freya. Birchall’s writing is vibrant, expressive, inspired, richly detailed, and incredibly funny. The Wedding Season is an insightful and thoughtful exploration of dealing with being jilted the day before your wedding after being with this person for over a decade, believing they would be your life partner. Birchall brilliantly captures Freya experiencing those moments when feelings and memories sneak up on you at unexpected moments.

On the eve of Freya Scott’s wedding to her long-term boyfriend Matthew, he calls it off, leaving her heartbroken and humiliated with a summer of seven weddings ahead of her to get through on her own. Freya’s friends come up with a wedding survival guide which includes a series of outrageous challenges for her to complete at each wedding to distract her from thoughts of Matthew, their wedding, and her future that he thoughtlessly ruined at the last minute. A wedding season of challenges draws Freya outside her comfort zone, and she unexpectedly finds herself having fun and learning new things about herself and what she wants from life. The wedding survival guide helps the wedding season fly by for Freya as she discovers that life has more in store for her than saying “I do,” including the possibility of finding love again.

Birchall writes dynamic, natural, hilarious, expressive, and vibrantly colorful and descriptive dialogue and character interaction. Her deftly developed characters are complex, fallible, fascinating, and likable (except Matthew). While they appear well off or affluent, their personalities are down to earth. In addition to being utterly entertaining, the interactions between the characters also further the plot and their development. Freya is sweet, vulnerable, funny, warm, and refreshingly honest. Her mind's inner workings and way of looking at the world create a fantastic mix of hilarious, anxiety-ridden, and full of spirit and courage she doesn’t even seem to be aware she possesses. Her best friend Ruby and fiancé Leo, the friends who come up with the wedding survival guide, are supportive, amazing friends. Their relationship and friendship with Freya are goals. Leo nicely contrasts with Freya’s ex-fiancé—as do other male characters. The wedding survival guide is an excellent idea, and the challenges are brilliant, fun, and perfect for getting Freya out of her head and distracting her from her ex and their break-up. They have the bonus of leading to self-discovery and growth for Freya. Freya’s relationships with her brother and father are sweet, while the past complicates her relationship with her mother.

I love how Freya’s conversations and interactions with Jamie, whom she meets in connection with one of her weddings for the season, sparkle with chemistry, humor, sweetness, intimacy, emotion, and unexpected connection. Jamie’s and Freya’s vibe is so swoony. Their chemistry flows so naturally even when they’re at odds. With just the right combination of sandpaper and chemistry, the friction between them makes things interesting, and the possibility for more sneaks right upon them.

In conclusion, I love everything about the Wedding Season! Most of all, I love how Birchall writes relationships, dialogue, and Freya’s thoughts. I could have kept reading about Freya, Jamie, her family, and friends.

The Wedding Season is a hilarious, sweet, slightly angsty, disarming novel about how taking detours when our lives don’t follow our plans can lead us down exciting paths—with new experiences, time, and space for self-discovery—to where we were meant to be, and we get what we need and wanted all along. And, if we’re lucky, we find someone to share our lives with who values and loves us as we are.

Thanks to Netgalley, St.Martin's Press, and Macmillan Audio for the ARC of this. I swapped back and forth between the audio and the ebook while I was reading this.

This was super cute and fun! I've had British romances in the past where I felt the romance played out too slowly for me, but this one was perfectly paced. I loved the side plot with all of the weddings and her friends, who did a great job of being there when she needed them. If you want a sweet rom-com, I totally recommend it.

Hmm...I just couldn't get into this one and I can't really pinpoint why. While I didn't feel a deep and soulful connection to Freya, I liked her well enough and I liked Jamie when he was introduced, but I was just so bored and couldn't stay engaged with this one. I still like Katy Birchall's quintessential British women's lit style, but this one just didn't work for me.

Everyone deserves the kind of friends who will see you at your worst and say, “You can be a perfect little slug for however long you want.” For Freya, the protagonist of The Wedding Season by Katy Birchall, those friends are Leo and Ruby, her best friends from college. Freya’s worst comes in the form of her fiancé, Matthew, who breaks up with her in a broom closet on the weekend of their wedding in the opening chapter of the novel.

Freya’s wedding to Matthew was supposed to be the first wedding of a summer filled with them, culminating in Leo and Ruby’s wedding to one another. After the breakup, Freya is still happy for her friends, but dreads all of the wedding festivities filling her weekends to come. Not only will she have to answer questions about her break up, she will also have to attend each bachelorette, shower, ceremony, and reception as a newly single woman when she thought she’d be going as part of a newly married couple.

Luckily (or unluckily, depending on one’s viewpoint) for Freya, her friends decide to provide her with a distraction to keep her from moping about her single state. The distraction? A list of challenges to accomplish at each of the weddings she is attending over the summer. The challenges range in type from the aerobic (be the last one standing on the dance floor) to the flirtatious (secure a good-night kiss) to the truly bonkers (run down the hotel corridor naked). Such is the power of friendship that Freya agrees to try them all.

In addition to the challenges, the narrative is peppered with other lists, too, such as a pro and con list of reasons to call/not call Matthew and a list of “things I have done because Matthew and I aren’t together”—sort of in the style of Bridget Jones’ Diary, although the novel is not written in diary form. These bits don’t necessarily contribute to the story, although they provide a dash of light-heartedness, particularly during the first half, when Freya is really grieving her relationship.

As she attends each hen-do and wedding event—pursuing her list of challenges all the while—Freya’s grief over her relationship begins to dissipate. It helps that she begins to consistently run into another wedding guest, Jamie, whose banter charms her more and more each time they meet.

But as much as her burgeoning romance with Jamie helps her recover from her heartbreak, the ties of friendship are what really help Freya sort out her emotions. Support doesn’t just come in the form of Leo and Ruby; she is also bolstered by the loosely connected group of people whose events she attends throughout the summer, as well as a caring father and brother, and a mother who is trying to make up for past mistakes. Birchall depicts all of the people in Freya’s life with realism; her friends and family have flaws, and not all of them show up in the way that Freya would like, but it is through leaning into those relationships—and learning to be open to new connections—that Freya is able to build her own happy ending.

This wasn’t for me. I understand the main character is dumped at the very beginning but she is still whining about it 1/3 of the way through the book. I’m sure in real life this would be very normal behavior but for me as a reader it was too much.

I was given an early e-book in exchange for an honest review..I loved this book. It isn’t just tailored to romance, I found myself chuckling several tjimes. The main. Character, Freyea,, the book is seen through her eyes. First wedding of the wedding season is to be Freyea a Matthew,, Freyea has been best friends forever with the girls that are getting married during the season. It ends with Ruby and Leo. Ruby is her very best friend.... Matthew has, the night before the wedding with a packed house decides he needs to talk to Freyea. He pulls her into the dust closet to tell her .He doesn’t want to marry her what if there is someone else out there. She takes it in stride and starts thinking of everything she has to cancel tomorrow, then she falls apart. Her dad told all the guests.the news. Next day Freyea starts canceling. Freyea can’t figure out what she did wrong they had been together twelve years. Why all of a sudden does he want out now. She asks Ruby and Leo. They are clueless too. Ruby and friends have developed tasks for her to complete at each wedding to make her get out of her comfort zone and mingle. The rest of the book she pretty much pines way form Matthew, as one would who had just been dumped. I got tired of the repetition of her thoughts overall if you look past that I found it fantastic. Having Freyea complete tasks worked out quite well in the end. Yes I would recommend this book for a fun weekend read or to take to the beach. Just read it for fun. Thanks to #NetGalley, #McMillan Press,, #KatyBirchall,, #TheWeddingSeasonan for the early review.

I honestly did not expect to love this book as much as I did. I loved the main character and how even though this was categorized as a romance it more so followed the story of the main character coming into her own after a bad breakup.

The Secret Bridesmaid was one of my favorite reads last year, so I was full of anticipation to read this one. While this book was not what I initially expected, it was such a sweet, fun, beautiful journey of a woman who is finding herself after heartbreak.

Freya is a woman who has it all- great friends, great job, and a fiancé she loves. But, when her fiancé dumps her the day before her wedding, Freya is left trying to put herself back together, while also navigating the summer wedding season. There was lots of hilarious situations (I was literally crying from laughing during one scene), but there were also many heart wrenching, painful moments. What I appreciated about this book was the author did not shy away from describing the different emotions Freya was facing. Saying goodbye to a man you have loved for 12 years is not an easy thing and it was written really well. In addition, the side characters were excellent. Her friends were so amazing and supportive! This is the tribe you want in life!

I was so impressed at how Freya's character was written. She was a woman going through a really tough time, but she was still a great person and did not give up in all areas of life because of that heartbreak. She was committed to her friendships, she was excellent at her job, and she managed to show a lot introspectiveness and growth during her journey. In addition, I loved that the author did not rely on the forced "lack of communication" trope that some rom-com authors pull to create unnecessary drama for love interests. When Freya does start finding love again, she does not lie about her situation or anything. I really, really appreciated that.

The plot was adorable and fun, but the main reason for the 5 stars was how fantastic Freya's character (and honestly, all the side characters) was written. I look forward to reading many more books by Katy Birchall!

Thank you, Netgalley, for the ARC of this novel in exchange for an honest review!

Thank you to Netgalley for a digital arc in exchange for an honest review!

I was excited to read this book, based on what I’d heard about the author’s other book, and based on the plot of this. Unfortunately, I was disappointed. I gave myself 50% to become invested, but even that far in, I just wasn’t, so I actually DNF’d it. I just couldn’t find myself to really care about what had happened to the main character. Is it completely messed up what happened to her? Absolutely. But the beginning was so drawn out that I lost interest pretty early on. The love interest, which I only found out from reading other reviews, wasn’t introduced until a third of the way in, and by 50%, they’d only had two very small interactions. Another review summed this book up perfectly. It barely counts as a romance. In fact, it leans significantly more in the womens fiction category. Which is why I’m still giving this book a 2.5 out of 5. I’m not a womens fiction fan, however, for those that are, I would still recommend checking this out. This kind of writing just wasn’t up my alley.

Thank you to NetGalley, St. Martins Press, and Katy Birchall for an eARC of this book.

This book was an absolute delight and charming read. While I started this book expecting more of a romance, it turned out to be more about the journey of the main character, Freya, through heartbreak, getting comfortable with being by herself, and just being a strong and confident woman. The romance is more of a subplot (which ended up being fine with me!).

The book starts off on the evening before her wedding where Freya’s fiancé and partner of 12 years breaks up with her (and essentially leaves her at the altar). Along with dealing with her own heartbreak, Freya has a season of seven weddings of close friends to attend in the months following. Her best friends (who are absolute delights as characters - I would love to read a sequel or prequel about their love story) come up with a Wedding Season survival plan where Freya will have to complete one task at each wedding to help her survive the Wedding Season. The book has the right about of introspection, banter and funny moments to make it a breezy yet impactful read. I would re-read this book.

Thanks to NetGalley, St. Martin's Press and the author Katiy Birchall. This was a good read. It was funny in many way with well written characters. The Secret Bridemaid made me read this.

When everyone's worst fear comes to life...Freya's husband completely leaves her husbandless. And like the title states, wedding season has come and left with no one to attend with her, she must make her way through it and survive wedding season. Can I just say I am in love with how supportive Freya's friends are, this author created in-depth supporting characters that helped the main character develop so much throughout the book. This book took love and put it aside rightfully for the development of Freya and life after the loss of love. I will say I did miss a romance and I would love to see another release or novella on the development of her new relationship!