Such a brilliant read!
I thought I was reading a romance, and it was, but it was so much more than that too. It was a family, and their lives. There were moments that felt so raw and real, and moments when I laughed along with them. If this was a movie, it would be one helluva cast of characters. Each person was unique and had me wanting to know more about them.
The Grant family. What a family indeed.
I hope, even though this story completely ended, that there will be another book. I want to know what life is like after the divorce. Where does Charlie go when she goes home from university? These burning questions will linger in my mind.
Another great read from Morgan Matson. She is quickly becoming a YA favorite of mine.

This was so cute! The characters were so charming! The dialogue was great and I couldn't get enough of their banter with each other. The whole book read like a movie and although the plot fell into many obvious cliches it worked well. I enjoyed the fact this book only gave us a tiny hint at potential romance but that the focus was on the relationships between siblings and the family. I do wish that the Mike/parents storyline was explored a bit more, it sorta felt as though it got resolved out of nowhere and nothing was really discussed...? But overall, this was definitely a quick, cute read and I'd definitely recommend!

This book was incredible. Unlike other Morgan Matson stories, where the romance plot is given the spotlight, Save the Date puts the Grant family front and center. That's not to say there isn't some romance, but it comes secondary to everything that is happening with this big family and it really gives room for a YA story that is about family, growing up, and dealing with change.

As usual the writing is on point, sweeping you along so that you immediately feel like you've been transplanted directly in the Grant's house. Despite only taking place across three days and with a large cast no less the story does not feel shallow or overwhelming in any way, managing to weave every plot together intricately and with care. I fell hard for this entire family and their hilarious wild attempt to hold a wedding. The events in the story were a little over the top and perhaps unlikely to happen, but the characters were all viscerally real and human, by the end of the story I felt like I actually knew them. Each character is given space to breathe, to be revealed as fully developed and well fleshed out. More than that their entangled relationships with each other, the complexities of sibling relationships, were also showcased and explored in depth.

If you already love Morgan Matson's books then you'll love this one too. For those new to Matson's world you'll adore it too if you're looking for a story with some emotional depth, a story about families, especially a story about siblings and all their differences and intricacies.

Morgan Matson did it again! I fell in LOVE with this book. Each page was incredibly riveting. The family dynamic was so incredible - it made me want to be part of the Grant's crazy life! I don't want to spoil this book for you - but all I can say is READ IT. Put it on your TBR and wish list! It's a completely heartwarming and humours young adult contemporary that focuses more on relationships than insta-love. 10/10 recommend!

I loved this! It was everything I could have asked for in a family drama. I need these books every once in a while. The kind you don’t have to analyze everything to try and figure things out, you can just sit back and enjoy. And I enjoyed it. The characters were well written and I could just feel the stress that I’m sure Linnie and Rodney were feeling as one thing after another went wrong before their wedding. The characters had their flaws obviously (hence some of the drama) but they’re a close loving family. And that matters. Charley was relatable. A lot of the characters were.
Five stars!

Save the date is another amazing release from Morgan Matson. I seriously could not stop laughing through out the whole book.
The main character Charlie is your typical puppy love struck teenager who is also the youngest sibling of six. She is the last one living at home as she finishes up high school and her parents get ready to sell their house. The same home Charlie has ever known and the inspiration for mother comic strip. Save the date follows her as she prepares for a reunion of her family for her sisters wedding and to see her estranged brothers best friend who she has had feelings for since she was younger. However, as the weekend of the wedding unfolds, havoc follows and feuds continue creating the perfect coming of age comedy.
Save the date is the perfect read for when you need a funny novel about family and all of their disfunctions. It reminds me of a teen movie but in book form. Fans of sixteen candles would surely enjoy this novel. I can’t think of any faults other than it being a little predictable at times. I love the messages wound throughout the story and the end. It is one of my top young adult picks of 2018 and a must read.

What a cute book! It had more to it than I was expecting, I thought it would be a little frolicky with a sweet romance, but there really wasn't very much romance, it was more about family. I loved the dynamic between the siblings and the parents.

The wedding planning had me on the edge of my seat with worry as things kept going wrong! I'm so glad my own wedding is over with so I don't have to be extra anxious about planning.

This was a really fun read, I will be reading more of Morgan Matson's books very soon!

The disaster wedding is a tired trope we’ve all seen before. Throughout this book, I cringed at the predictable plot lines as everything that could go wrong with Charlie’s older sister’s wedding did go wrong. An MIA wedding planner, mixed up decorations, the wrong wedding band, feuding family members, a freeloading uncle, and a destroyed wedding cake... pretty sure we’ve seen all these plots in romantic comedies before.

I was surprised, then, when this book turned out to be much more than its cover and the main wedding disaster storyline would suggest. Matson wrote the Grant family, a large family with five kids, as complex characters, each one having their own character traits and faults. The other major storyline, the end of a long-running For Better or for Worse-style comic strip that Charlie’s mother wrote, and was not-so-loosely based on the real Grant family, adds complexity and a plot point that feels fresh and new, which made me feel like the wedding tropes were forgivable. Ultimately, this book is about families, and growing up, and change, and all the good stuff the best YA novels explore.

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for proving me an eARC of this book.

First time reading this author and won’t be the last! This was such a beautiful, touching, hilarious and heartwarming story about a young girls realization that she may have been seeing her family through rose coloured glasses! The dynamic and banter between the siblings was perfection and I really enjoyed seeing Charlie come into her own. The shenanigans throughout the wedding weekend had me laughing out loud. I truly enjoyed this family and felt like they were the family we all wished we had growing up, so I definitely identified with Charlie’s feelings. This was an awesome, quirky, funny story with some real depth to it and I definitely recommend it!
* I received a copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review *

What makes this a good book is also the thing that makes it frustrating to read.

Charlie, our POV character, is a high school senior trying to keep her family together. Unfortunately, since she’s the youngest of five, it's a lost cause. The other siblings are pretty much grown and gone and the only reason they're together this weekend is because the eldest sister is getting married, so Charlie's doing a lot of really stupid things for an understandable, though ultimately futile, reason.

On top of it all, her parents just sold the house she grew up in. So while she's trying to micromanage her sister's wedding weekend she's determined to go to the local college even though she was accepted to Northwestern’s prestigious school of journalism, imagining that this will make things stay the same. (I, for one, wanted to reach into the narrative and shake a little sense into her.)

But all the adults around her are not just allowing, but relying on her to manage things. Every time something goes wrong they all turn to Charlie. It's kind of understandable when her sister, the bride, does it, but what about the rest of them? Her parents, her other siblings, adults all, are dumping on her shoulders. And she feels responsible for everything.

I had some difficulty getting into this book, because it started with a really uncomfortable (to me) seduction scene. It goes like this: Charlie has had a crush on her older brother's best friend [name] forever, and suddenly they're all alone, after a party, both having had a few beers. To me, it feels like he's hitting on her because she's THERE, not because he cares about her.


Just for the record, I'm on Mike's (the estranged brother) side of the dispute, and don't understand why no one else is. This is definitely a case of effect being greater than intent. Mom caused quite a bit of damage, intentionally, or not. (Want to know what I'm talking about? Read the book.)

Also, as a Canadian, I'm a little miffed at the outright theft of one of our icons. Eleanor Grant, the family matriarch, is very obviously a knock-off of our very own Lynn Johnston, creator of the comic strip For Better or For Worse!

Did not finish. Can't really review. Did not catch my interest enough to warrant wanting to keep reading.

Morgan Matson is honestly the queen of contemporaries. I read Amy and Roger’s Epic Detour three years ago and that was probably my first real introduction to YA contemporary and ever since then I’ve been hooked. I’ve read all of her books except for one (Second Chance Summer) and they never fail to impress me. They’re a fun quick read which is guaranteed to leave you swooning.

I read someone’s review on Save The Date and they said that it reminded them of a movie and the minute I saw that I couldn’t stop thinking of this as a movie. I mean everyone knows that wedding movies are honestly the best and Save The Date is filled with the most hilarious shenanigans so can a movie of this please happen? It would seriously be epic.

As with any book by Morgan Matson, the characters were amazing! I especially loved all the different sibling dynamics we saw as Charlie interacted with all of the, throughout the book. They all had such interesting character traits and and were all very complex and I really liked seeing their personality and relationship develop. Though this book takes place over a very short period of time we learn a lot about them and they really grow and their point of views change a lot. It was really interesting see just how much they change and how much the wedding weekend affected them.

While I really liked Charlie’s( the main character) relationships with her siblings I just wished we would’ve gotten just a little bit more insight into other aspects of her life. While it’s very clear that her family is very important to her, I would’ve liked to seen just a little bit more surrounding her passion for journalism or her best friend so we got a more rounded perspective of her personality. At times I found her a little annoying because she was SO obsessed with her siblings and it just felt like a little much at times.

Despite this being a Morgan Matson book we don’t really have a clear romantic interest. I mean of course there is romantic elements which I absolutely adored but the focus was really family which I really appreciated. So few contemporaries focus on family so I really appreciated romance taking the back burner because it’s usually the other way around. I would’ve liked just a little bit more scenes with the potential love interest because what little scenes we did get were amazingly cute but all in all I’m really happy with the way Matson centered the book

I don't know why but I could not get into this novel. I started reading and put it down then tried to go back another time but still could not get into it.

Twinkle lonely at school. Her ex-best friend, Maddie has left her to hang out with the popular kids. Twinkle longs to become one of them so that she and Maddie can be friends again. Twinkle think that the best way to do this would be to date Neil Roy, a popular pre-Olympic athlete. Twinkle is an aspiring film director, so when Neil's twin brother Sahil approaches her to collaborate for a movie project, she thinks this is her chance. Twinkle spends more time with Sahil, working on the movie and begins to see him in a new light. She also meets his friends and begins spending time with them. To complicate matters further, Twinkle gets an anonymous admirer sending her emails, only signing the name 'N'.

Charlie Grant's parents have decided to sell Charlie's childhood home, and she wants just one perfect weekend with all her siblings. Charlie's sister Linnie is getting married at the house, so it's the perfect opportunity for all her older siblings to come home for one last chance to relive memories. Charlie's mother is also a famous cartoonist for a syndicated comic strip and she decides to have an interview with national television while all the kids are in the house. No pressure! Unfortunately Linnie's wedding planner has skipped town and EVERYTHING goes wrong.

This book was a bit more serious than some of the other YA contemporary, such as Kasie West. There are feuds, antagonistic neighbors, estranged family and failed relationships. It was the definition of a messy family relationship and I was into it. I loved the writing, combining humor and keeping the content relatively lighthearted. It was the definition of dysfunctional family relationships in a total sitcom way.

I felt that the book was a little light on the romance. I loved the Charlie and the guy she winds up with, but there just was not enough screen time for them with all of the family hijinks. Don't mistake me, they had some adorable scenes...but it just wasn't quite enough for me.

This was a very charming, light read about a family wedding and a teen struggling to find her place in her changing family and world. The characters were relatable, as were the interactions between them—especially the five siblings. The plot was well-paced, with a cascading list of wedding-related disasters that kept the pace nice and brisk. A great pick for fans of Sarah Dessen.

I didn’t love this. This very much felt like a story where I could tell what was going to happen - everything that could possibly go wrong was going to go wrong. I don’t think there was a single point I could genuinely say was a surprise or a twist. I also didn’t hate this. The book wasn’t terrible, it just felt a little contrived, the jumble of characters overwhelming and unnecessary.
It felt like a tcontemporary drama/comedy type of movie where the author is simply trying to fit as many “funny” moments as possible into a short space of time.
I wouldn’t really recommend this, other than maybe if someone was looking for a middle of the road book that didn’t really require any thinking.

Charlie Grant's parents have decided to sell Charlie's childhood home, and she wants just one perfect weekend with all her siblings. Charlie's sister Linnie is getting married at the house, so it's the perfect opportunity for all her older siblings to come home for one last chance to relive memories. Charlie's mother is also a famous cartoonist for a syndicated comic strip and she decides to have an interview with national television while all the kids are in the house. No pressure! Unfortunately Linnie's wedding planner has skipped town and EVERYTHING goes wrong.

This book was a bit more serious than some of the other YA contemporary, such as Kasie West. There are feuds, antagonistic neighbors, estranged family and failed relationships. It was the definition of a messy family relationship and I was into it. I loved the writing, combining humor and keeping the content relatively lighthearted. It was the definition of dysfunctional family relationships in a total sitcom way.

I felt that the book was a little light on the romance. I loved the Charlie and the guy she winds up with, but there just was not enough screen time for them with all of the family hijinks. Don't mistake me, they had some adorable scenes...but it just wasn't quite enough for me. Honestly, this is probably the sole reason for a 4/5 rating instead of 5/5.

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The book did touch on some interesting issues with growing up. Charlie is desperate to relive her past during the wedding weekend, and make memories with her family. As she does so, she actively alienates herself from her non-family members. She even plans on staying close to home for college to be with her parents instead of branching out and seeing the world. I thought that the arc of Charlie maturing was very well done.

Save the Date is the story of the Grant family coming together for a family wedding. Little do they know it will be the end of normal life for the family. They are expecting the end of their mother’s cartoon strip but not the other monumental events. As the family has grown over the years there are tales that should have been told...and they start to come out at the wedding that is plagued with problems.

***I received a free e-copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you to NetGalley, the publisher and the author for the opportunity to read this title.***

I feel very lucky that I was given the chance to read Save the Date, by author Morgan Matson, early. It was much more of a coming of age story than a romance, which surprised me.

Charlie’s older sister is getting married the same weekend that her mother’s famous comic strip—based on their family—is coming to an end. It will be the first time in a long time that her 4 siblings will be under one roof and she’s looking forward to things being like old times. Her whole life feels like it’s in transition, and she wants a break from thinking about which college to choose and why. Plus, she’s looking forward to seeing her long-time crush Jesse. If only the weekend wasn’t morphing into a giant fiasco. From a howling dog to a broken alarm, cheapskates and feuding exs, ornery neighbours and mis-booked vendors, not to mention a missing tuxedo. Charlie’s scrambling to make the weekend perfect for Linnie, and along the way, she learns a lot about her family and herself.

I liked Charlie. She was level-headed and kind. She tried very hard to keep everyone happy with a few exceptions. This story had lots of laughs because of all the problems. Though I admit they got to be a bit much because almost nothing went right. I loved the relationship Charlie had with Linnie and her oldest brother Danny. JJ and Mike were a different story. I felt like I didn’t really get to know JJ, more that he was there for comic relief. Mike was aloof and I struggled with how he’d treated the family as a whole. Rodney, Linnie’s fiancé, seemed like a very nice man, the sort of guy you’d want your daughter to marry. The parents are there, but they’re not. Charlie really was the one who picked up the slack and I found myself asking why her mother and father didn’t do more. I liked the touches of the comics, though they brought a darker element to the plot than I was expecting. I really liked Bill. Though he was in the story often enough, he remained on the fringe, much to my disappointment. I felt terrible for Brooke. I agreed with Charlie that what happened to Brooke was unfair.

The problems that arose regarding the wedding were difficult to predict and well done. It was the emotions and relationships that were easier to predict. I realized the problems early on and surmised how they would play out. I think this left me feeling like the plot was somewhat shallow. The weight of the story surrounded the wedding problems, not character development, save for Charlie. She showed a lot of growth.

The writing was great. I think anyone who’s read Matson’s other books will agree. For me, this fell in the middle of the other 2 in terms of stars. I just needed a little more emotional balance, a little more ‘feel good’ to round out the stress and angst. I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who loves a coming of age story or enjoys lots of laughs and appreciates some absurd things happening.

Morgan Matson has been one of my favourite authors since I first read her debut novel, Amy & Roger's Epic Detour, and she has not disappointed me since. Save the Date is no exception. The story follows Charlie Grant, a 17-year-old senior who is caught up in trying to make sure her sister's wedding goes perfectly, while also trying to spend time with her large family whenever she can. The wedding poses as a hilarious backdrop for all of the mishaps that occurs within the novel. Some of the situations seemed a little ridiculous and unrealistic, but they were funny and led to some heartwarming moments. I really enjoyed the broad cast of characters and the Grant family dynamics. 

I also appreciated how this story wasn't too romance based and it tended to focus more on family. There were still some cute and romantic moments, but it didn't detract from the main plot. One of my favourite things about Matson's books is that she often incorporates little extras in between chapters. The comic strips in Save the Date added a wonderful touch to emphasize the family.

All in all, Save the Date was a really cute and fun read that highlighted the importance of family (and to not trust people named after fruit).