“When you get dumped the day before your wedding in a broom cupboard, suddenly everything seems a bit shit.”

The Wedding Season is a fun and humorous women’s fiction book about a hard topic: being dumped the day before your wedding. After being with Matthew for 12 years, Freya has to get through Wedding Season by herself. Luckily, she has an amazing family and group of friends to help her move forward.

I really enjoyed this book! I loved watching Freya let loose, seek out new hobbies, be awkward, and forge new and remade relationships. Ruby and Leo are absolutely the best, and I was glad that their wedding was the one to close out Wedding Season. This book is charming and delightful while also giving a lovely reminder that we need to surround ourselves with people “love each other, guide each other, don’t give up on each other” and “don’t let each other give up on ourselves.”

Thanks to St. Martin’s Griffin for this ARC!

Mean Girls meets Jane Austen in Lex Croucher’s Reputation. Except… the girls are REALLY mean. I was expecting the scandal, gossip, and partying based off of this book’s premise, but I really just didn’t like any of the main girls. They are entitled, they complain, they put themselves in bad situations, they treat other people like dirt, and they’re just plain awful. Betty, a side character whose conversation skills include talking about gravel for long periods of time, and Thomas, a respectable man with a library (heyyyy) were the only two likable characters. The ending had some redeeming arcs for the characters, but overall, this just wasn’t for me.

Thanks to St. Martin’s Griffin for the ARC!

4.5 ⭐️

“Jaques Ellul said, ‘When we see someone as our neighbor, we see a person to whom we are responsible.’ We feed the hungry, we speak for the voiceless, we care for the sick, because when we do so, we care for our brothers and sisters and we represent the love of Jesus. We belong to one another.”

Neighborliness is the empowering anthem to loving and serving others that we need in 2022. David Docusen walks us through finding commonality with those we don’t think we can connect with, doing internal work to learn about our inattentional blindness, implicit bias, and aversion to discomfort, and learning to humble ourselves and listen to those in communities around us. This book is incredible because it’s so practical, sharing how we not only have to figure out what’s going on within ourselves, but we need to educate ourselves, lament with other communities, see how changing people can change systems, and learn to build relationships. Done are the days of toxic charity - Neighborliness is the guide we need to reframe what it looks like to be someone’s neighbor and rebuild and restore communities.

Thank you so much to Frontgate Media for the copy of this book.

Lots of action but just waaaayyyyyyyy too long.