4 ⭐️ wow did I truly love reading this book! I loved the premise of a strong friend group who navigates becoming adults together! I really liked the dual timeline and getting to see how all the friendships progressed and relationships progressed along the way. It definitely felt more to me than just in normal romance. I will say the one thing that really kept it from being a five star was I felt like there were some plot points that needed to be developed more. I wanted more from the relationship of Wyatt and Chloe, rather than going from 0 to 100 on Chloe’s side. I also really didn’t want Luke to have a happy ending. Like he did not deserve a happy ending. But overall, it was a fun read, and something I would definitely recommend to others!

This was an advanced read copy I received through Netgalley so it’s not going to be officially published until August 13, 2024! But this is my honest review!

Add this book to your to read list, I promise you won’t regret it! & then let me know what you thought!

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I was captivated with this book from the very beginning. Ingram weaves in the background of each character in the friend group while building sympathy for Chloe, who recently rejected her longtime boyfriend Luke's proposal. When the six reunite for a vacation at one of the other couple's homes, tensions are high. Readers quickly realized there is a new budding romance and it is easy to root for this one, too. Add this to your to-read list for the dog days of summer!

Friends since freshman year of college, Chloe, Luke, Wyatt, Marianne, Sloan, and Alden have been through all the ups and downs post college together. Once a year they get together for a group trip until Chloe says no to Luke’s marriage proposal and fractures the group. Secrets are kept, struggles are had, paths diverge, but now it is time to clear the air.

This is reminiscent of “Happy Place” or “The Celebrants” with a tight knit group of friends who have reunited. Told through a dual timelines: a current and a forward moving past timeline, history slowly reveals itself to keep the book moving forward. Between this writing convention and guessing the ending pretty early in the book, the pacing felt a little slow, but definitely kept me reading well into the night. The characters were well developed and most showed growth throughout the book. I did get a strong millennial vibe from this book from the characters, which was odd nuance that helped me understand the book a little better. Overall a great, easy to read book for fans of found family, FRIENDS, or ensemble cast books.

Audrey Ingram's THE GROUP TRIP gripped me from the start with a powerful sense of place, glorious language, phrases I will never forget -- never mind the characters, so well drawn and fluid in time and in relationship with one another. I truly felt an honored guest on this transformational trip for a group of old friends with memories and motives and agendas roiling beneath every conversation, twist and turn of this well-plotted story. I received a copy of this book and these thoughts are my own, unbiased opinions.

Rounding up from 4.5 stars

The cover of this book makes it look like a light, beach read. However, this contemporary romance novel also has quite a bit of drama and a dash of comedy. I actually cried a few times.

The Group Trip follows 6 friends through college up to the present day. The chapters go back and forth between past and present detailing the ups and downs that each member of the group experiences over the years and their relationships with each other as they evolve and change. As the friends grow and move on with their lives they struggle to keep the same dynamic they had in college and not grow apart while keeping secrets from one another.

Thank you to NetGalley and Alcove Press. I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.

Absolutely loved this book. What a cute little summer read. Loved the characters and relationships that were written here and just really don’t have anything bad to say.

About a third of the way through this book, I realized I am definitely not the target audience. Self-absorbed twenty-somethings fixated on their narcissistic needs just does not resonate with me. I just didn't relate to Chloe, Luke and the lesser characters.

I try to be an objective critic, and I truly thank NetGalley and Alcove Press for the ARC and the opportunity to review this book. I’m sure it will appeal to a younger audience.

Thank you to NetGalley and Alcove Press for early access to this title in exchange for my review. This book was a story of long-time friendship. A group of friends have continued their friendship since college and continue to do group vacations together. Some of the friendships have turned romantic and some of the romance has ended. The question is whether their friendship group can continue after the broken hearts. I do recommend this book as a fast, fun read!

Thank you NetGalley and Alcove Press for the opportunity to read and review The Group Trip by Audrey Ingram.

Six young adults become friends in college. Our main character Chloe and Luke begin dating which brings Chloe into a ready-made friend group. They all stay close through college, graduation, and beyond; until Chloe and Luke break up. The main premise of this novel is what happens to the friend group once two participants are no longer together or are awkwardly staying away from outings and group related events. Each individual in the group has a problem that needs solved. They all finally agree to take a one-week vacation together to smooth everything over. This is where the meat of the story will take place.

I liked the characters, some more than others. This is a dual timeline story, but I really enjoyed one timeline much more than the other. I would have loved to just stay in the present-day timeline and less of the history of the group. All that to say, I really enjoyed the last 20 percent of the book the best, but you will have to read it to know what I am referring to in the book. The Group Trip will be available for purchase on August 13th. Happy Reading !!

The Group Trip follows a group of 6 very different best friends who have to learn how to navigate life after college. Their latest group trip is brought on by the secrets each of them has kept. As they start to see each other with changing perspectives, years of animosity between friends and ex’s is brought to the surface and tensions rise as the week continues. The jumps between past moments among friends to the present gave me such insight into each character.
It was easy to fall in love with not only the friendships the characters shared, but the characters themselves, especially Chloe. Her struggle with the messiness of transitioning into adulthood makes her relatable to everyone who has ever struggled to determine who they want to become. The Group Trip is a captivating story of friendship and love that explores the effects of making life altering decisions based on someone else’s or a whole group’s desires instead of your own.

Thank you to Alcove Press and Netgalley for the arc!

Thanks NetGalley for the ARC of The Group Trip by Audrey Ingram
I loved this novel. I loved the plot, the characters, the setting, the descriptions!
This novel flowed so well and was so easy to read, but had so many layers. The author created amazing relationships between a group of friends, I absolutely loved the main character, Chloe. I enjoyed how the story was told both present and past.
I've got this author's other book on my to be read list.

A decent story and plot with a nice range of diverse characters. The non-linear narrative style works really well in delivering key elements and facts, and these are delivered in a practical fashion to contrast the past with the present. The narrative spans over many years and follows college friends throughout the lives, and I feel like the exploration of how their lives grow and develop is done really well.
I did find some elements in the writing style repetitive, but the well-developed plot did make up for that.
Diversity of the characters was interesting, although I didn't find myself liking some of them the way that I wanted to.
It's a nice, light, and easy read.

Thank you NetGalley and the author for giving me a copy of this book for my honest review!

I love a dual timeline book. I also love how it felt like Happy Place but didn’t feel like it was coping or at all. It was a perfect example of how you can have a book that is the same trope but has a different spin on it at the same time!

The Group Trip was the book I have been waiting for. Inexplicably, I have read a handful of "college friends get together a decade later" books this year and The Group Trip is far and away the best of the bunch. It is a shorter book, coming in at just over 300 pages, but I couldn't put it down and finished within 24 hours. I really enjoyed reading about Chloe's character growth and her understanding of how she had tried to fit herself into this box of what other people felt was acceptable. All of the characters were compelling and while their secrets weren't exactly mind-blowing, they were real. I think thats what it comes down to the most--all of the characters felt completely authentic. If you love character driven stories about friendship, The Group Trip is for you.

The Group Trip is one of the best books I have read in 2024. In chapters alternating between current time and years prior, we get to know a group of six friends from colleges. Luke and Chloe have pretty much always been together, while the other four in the group hold steady. When Chloe declines Luke’s proposal, the entire dynamic of the group changes and shifts, as friend groups do. Sloane is determined to keep the six of them intact by inviting them on their annual vacation, but not all goes as planned.

Special thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for a free, electronic ARC of this novel received in exchange for an honest review.

This is my first book by Audrey Ingram but won’t be my last. I’m usually not a big fan of timeline jumping, but in this case, both timelines held their own, and switching between them didn’t drag the story down.

The Group Trip follows a group of friends from college into adult life and adult problems and how the group dynamics can change over time.

I love a good found family story, and for Chloe, this is her found family and her struggle to not lose them. I happily went along for the ride even though some of Chloe’s decisions and logic drove me a bit crazy and I felt like a lot of the story happened to her rather than her making the decisions in the story. Yes, she had one big decision that is the core of the book, BUT so much of the past storyline is her just floating along which did get tiresome.

But, like I said, I love a good found family story and I love strong friendship stories and the friendships in The Group Trip are well done and highlight such a key component during a pivotal time in life! And if you’re lucky enough to find a couple of friends like this, you really have hit the friend lottery. They do exist and this book highlights the precious qualities of true friends.

The Group Trip is a fantastic summer read. If you need a lighter book in between dark books, this is a great one to add into the mix!

This book was a surprisingly wonderful 5 star read. It was highly relatable and I’m still thinking about it days after I finished. The story weaves between past and present following the friendship of 6 people that meet in college and all the highs and lows they experience together. Present day takes place 10 years after freshman year and the flashbacks provide the reader with an understanding of their deep, yet at times tumultuous, friendships. When Chloe says no to Luke’s long awaited proposal, leaving everyone in disbelief, the story beings leading up to her surprising decision. Saying no fractures the once tight knit group leaving Chloe alone in her grief as she feels lost without her friends that had become her family. After her (mostly) self imposed year long exile from her friends the leader of the group, Sloane, invites them all to a week long vacation at her lavish home on Florida’s Emerald Coast. She is clear the trip is to get Chloe and Luke back together, to right their wrongs and salvage the group. As the story unfolds we learn that they all have secrets they have been keeping from each other. Will their history and the love they have for each other survive?

I gave this book 5 stars because it kept my attention and I could relate to the characters. It starts out as present day then goes back and forth from this year to years ago. It ends in the present day but it will not make you forget what all happens.

I enjoyed that this book dove right into the complexities of decade long friendships, and the convicts that arise from romantic vs plutonic relationships. It's told in a non linear timeline in third person pov, and was still an easy vacation read.

I saw pretty early on where the author was taking us, but that didn't deter me. And while I had hoped she'd get us there a little faster, so see more into that relationship, I think the way it was told had to happen to tell the whole story.

Would recommend!

**Thank you NetGalley and [publisher] for sending this book for review. All opinions are my own.**

A good book, but not a fantastic one.

I'm not sure, but I think that I have never read a book with so many unlikeable characters before. We have wishy-washy Chloe and a selfish Luke, Sloane, who forces everyone to do what she wants, and Wyatt, who is hiding the biggest secret of all.

I DO understand that this is a novel about growing up and personality growth, but still. Another problem I had with this book is that it had so many characters that most of them got lost in the background. They never get fully fleshed out. Normally, this wouldn't be a problem for me, as every book needs secondary and tertiary characters. However, the problem here is that this book is about six people who are friends during college and remain so after college, right into mature adulthood - they ALL should have gotten their tales told. But they didn't. That is, of course, just my opinion, and many other readers will see it another way.

This story is told in split timelines, starting in the present and then interspersing each 'present' chapter with past years and how things came to be. It works its way to the end when we finally get to understand why and what was happening in the prologue.


This book mostly centers on Chloe and her relationship with Luke. It then throws in other people who are all holding on to secrets (the biggest one is really easy to guess), and some are even telling lies.

*This ARC was provided by the publisher Alcove Press, the author, and NetGalley.