The Wedding Season: A Novel

Written by Katy Birchall

Narrated by Daphne Kouma

Four Weddings and a Funeral meets The Wedding Party in Katy Birchall's The Wedding Season: when a recently jilted bride is forced to attend seven weddings in one summer, her friends devise a series of challenges as distraction.

Freya Scott is getting married. Her wedding to Matthew, her long-term boyfriend, is the first of eight in her calendar this year, and as someone who prides herself on being meticulously organized, Freya is intent on making it the perfect day to remember.

But when Matthew calls things off hours before they walk down the aisle, Freya’s entire life plan goes up in smoke. Humiliated and heartbroken, the last thing she wants is to attend a summer of other peoples’ nuptials on her own.

Fortunately, her friends have an idea: together they devise a series of outrageous challenges for Freya to complete at each event, designed to distract her from Matthew and what might have been. From getting stuck in an old church bathroom and needing to be rescued by the vicar to making out with a barman at a French chateau, Freya realizes that despite herself, she might just be having fun.

By the time the final wedding arrives, she will discover that the road to a happy ending sometimes has unexpected detours, that “I do” is only the beginning––and that perhaps her own love story isn’t over just yet.

A Macmillan Audio production from St. Martin's Griffin.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Audio
• Release date: May 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781250855275

Katy Birchall

Katy Birchall is the author of the side-splittingly funny The It Girl: Superstar Geek and its eagerly-awaited sequels The It Girl: Team Awkward and The It Girl: Don't Tell the Bridesmaid. Katy won the 24/7 Theatre Festival Award for Most Promising new Comedy Writer with her very serious play about a ninja monkey at a dinner party.

Reviews for The Wedding Season

[Andrea Author · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When her fiancé ends their engagement, Freya spends the next weeks mourning the loss, figuring out how to feel normal again. She dreads the slew of weddings she's scheduled to attend over the summer. Her BFFs come up with a plan: they give her a series of challenges to complete at each event, each one more shocking than the last. Can Freya find the strength to move out of her comfort zone and learn to fall in love again?

Katy Birchall has a strong, humorous voice that make this book fun to read. It's women's fiction, not romance, with the love interest playing a secondary role. The first quarter of the book consists of Freya grieving, with a few outrageous incidents to keep it from becoming maudlin. After that, the pace picks up, and the book develops more of a chick lit feel. Still, the specter of the broken engagement hovers over the book—the closure of Freya's relationship with her ex plays as large a role in the book as the new relationship with the love interest.

Do I wish there had been more romance and less grief in this book? Yes. But that's not the story the author was telling. This is a funny, emotional read with a satisfying ending that should appeal to women's fiction and rom com readers alike. The audiobook narration was delightful and helped to counter some of the sadness.

Thanks, NetGalley, for the ARC I received. This is my honest and voluntary review.