The Wedding That Wasn’t
In which our heroine learns to stay out of broom cupboards, and hold tight to her friends.
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.
(I myself am getting married this summer, so this was perhaps not the ideal plot line for me to be reading at the moment—luckily, my fiancé is not the “Matthew” type!)
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 something like 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, it is the ties of friendship that 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.
Read this if you liked:
Lovesick on Netflix, for the twenty-something Londoners
In a New York Minute by Kate Spencer, for the focus on friendship
Fun Fact
Katy Birchall is also the author of the novelization of the TV show Sex Education (which is one of my favorite series).