Katy Birchall’s The Wedding Season opens with Freya Scott being heartbroken and humiliated by her long-term boyfriend jilting her on the eve of their wedding, leaving her with a summer of seven weddings to get through on her own. Freya’s friends create a wedding survival guide with a series of outrageous challenges for her to complete at each wedding to distract her. These wedding season survival challenges draw Freya outside her comfort zone, and she unexpectedly finds herself having fun and learning new things about herself and what she wants from life. As the wedding season passes quickly by with the aid of the survival guide, Freya discovers that life has more in store for her than saying “I do” to the wrong person, like maybe finding love with a person who’s just right for her.

Daphne Kouma wonderfully narrates Birchall’s beautifully written rom-com in first-person POV. Kouma’s vibrant narration brings Birchall’s enchanting story and characters vividly to life, portraying the characters’—particularly Freya’s—emotions and experiences with subtle nuances, cadences, and flair, drawing me in from the first scene and deeply investing me in Freya’s journey. I love every second of Birchall’s novel and Kouma’s expressive narration, which complements Birchall’s narrative style and language usage. She perfectly narrates both the male and female characters, giving them distinct voices that capture their personalities, dialects, and accents, matching their moods for each scene. Her narration for Freya, the protagonist, and POV character, is poignantly filled with emotion, personality, sparkle, and charm. Kouma’s voice and British English London accent are delightful, as is her French accent. I couldn’t imagine anyone else narrating this lovely novel with more eloquence, exuberance, or charm. The audiobook opens with a brief whimsical score that sets the novel’s lighthearted tone.

Birchall’s writing is vibrant, expressive, inspired, richly detailed, and incredibly funny. With introspection and insight, she explores being jilted on the eve of your wedding after being with someone for over a decade, believing they’re your life partner. She brilliantly captures Freya experiencing feelings and memories sneak up on her unexpectedly. Birchall writes dynamic, natural, hilarious, emotional, and vibrantly colorful and descriptive dialogue and character interactions. Kouma’s expressive and lively narration style magnificently highlights these aspects of Birchall’s storytelling, making her a spot-on narrator. Birchall’s deftly developed characters are complex, fallible, fascinating, likable, and down to earth. Utterly entertaining, the characters’ interactions also further their development and the plot. Freya is sweet, vulnerable, funny, warm, and refreshingly honest. Her mind's inner workings and worldview are a fantastic mix of hilarity, anxiety-ridden, spirit, and courage she doesn’t even seem to be aware she possesses. Kouma’s narration for these scenes is hilarious and, at times, heart-wrenching.

Her BFFs, Ruby and Leo, who concoct the wedding survival guide, are supportive and amazing friends. The wedding survival guide challenges are inspired, fun, and ideal for getting Freya out of her head and distracting her from her ex and their break-up—with the bonus of helping with Freya’s self-discovery and growth. Freya’s relationships with her brother and father are sweet, while she reconciles her complicated past relationship with her mother. Freya’s conversations and interactions with Jamie, whom she meets during her friend’s weddings, sparkle with chemistry, humor, sweetness, intimacy, emotion, and unexpected connection. Jamie’s and Freya’s vibe is swoony. Yet, their chemistry flows naturally, even when they’re at odds. With just the right combination of sandpaper and chemistry, their friction makes things interesting. The possibility of a deeper relationship sneaks right upon them.

I love everything about the Wedding Season! But most of all, I love how Birchall writes relationships, dialogue, and Freya’s thoughts. I could keep reading about Freya, Jamie, etc. Kouma’s narration takes your reading experience to the next level by animating all the fantastic aspects of the story, characters, and Birchall’s writing that you cannot truly appreciate until you hear someone reading it aloud.

The Wedding Season is a fast-paced, hilarious, sweet, slightly angsty, disarming novel I highly recommend in audio to rom-com and wedding novel fans for maximum pleasure.

Advanced review copy provided by Macmillan Audio via Netgalley for review.

This is absolutely a great and funny story and I highly recommend the audiobook if you listen to books. Accents were the icing on the cake to great acting and storytelling throughout. First, I’m not sure I would classify this strictly as a romance. While there is a romance at the frontline its more of a ‘moving on’ story than anything and the romance felt secondary to the development of our main character.

Speaking of our main character: Freya is about to get married when her fiance Matthew, significant other of 12 years, cancels the wedding the day before their vows and promptly dumps her. Freya, reeling from the loss and the trauma of a wedding canceled, now must make it through ‘the wedding season’ - a line up of seven weddings that she is supposed to be at for the next few months. Her friends give her a list of challenges to do at each wedding to help her survive and hopefully, move on.

First, my significant other Matthew who I have been with for 12 years got a stern talking to about his life status if he ever did this to me (zero life status). But once that fear was unlocked and shoved to the side, the book opened into a pretty lovely story of moving forward, friendship, love, and family. Freya is not just propelled to happiness because she meets someone new. Freya takes a slow journey to discover her own happiness and reconnect more strongly to those around her. Its really very nice and I might have cried a few times.

There’s also some pretty satisfying ‘get him back’ moments but it's also interspersed with real conversations about life and happiness. I really think it had a perfect mixture of light and serious.

This book is also so funny. I was laughing out loud at work a few times. Love Freya’s internal monologues and there are of course, the usual whacky situations that she finds herself in. The banter is super fun even during stronger emotional moments. The romance was cute and easy to cheer for almost right away but again didn’t even feel like the whole focus, in a nice way.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book and had a good time crying and laughing while listening to it.

This was narrated by Daphne Kuoma who did a five star job. Thank you to Netgalley and Macmillan Audio for a copy of this audiobook!

Thank you to Netgalley for the audio version of this book! I enjoyed listening to the book and finding out what was the next wedding season challenge and how she was going to handle whatever her friends threw at her to do. The friends made up a wedding season to do task list after she was left jilted the day before her own wedding. The accent of the reader was also fun to listen to!

Freya is dumped on the day before her wedding and she did NOT see it coming.
Reeling from her unexpected break-up, Freya tries to adjust to the sudden changes in her life and it is not easy.
I listened to the audiobook version of The Wedding Season by Katy Birchall, narrated by the talented Daphne Kouma and it was both heartbreaking and laugh out loud funny.

Freya's friends devise a scheme to help Freya get through a busy upcoming season of multiple weddings, and the funny little dares they challenge her with for the different events make for many light hearted moments. But the book also showed a very relatable person dealing with loss and change in all the little ways that crop up during your day to day life.

Freya spends a lot of time thinking things through and processing things in her head. But I loved seeing her grow and change, learning to adapt and discovering what she is capable of doing on her own. She even discovers the possibility of falling in love again.
Overall the story was charming, and full of heart. Freya was a character I could root for as she struggled through her heartbreak.

Thank you NetGalley and Macmillan Audio for allowing me to listen to and review this audiobook.

Freya’s fiancé calls off their wedding the day before they were to be married. Freya’s friends rally around her and help plan a way for her to focus on a challenge rather than her broken engagement. She has several other weddings she will have to attend over the upcoming season. As I listened to an audiobook version narrated by Daphne Kouma, I wanted to touch on the narration a bit.. Daphne performs the narration with and English / British accent. It was well done and amusing for its emotional tangents. I usually listen to audiobooks at 2x but I had to slow this down a bit for the accent since sometimes I have a hard time picking up on them. The narration is done with a light touch from the female perspective in her mid 20’s approximately. Most of this book dealt with Freya’s emotional journey between the breakup and her friends and family support getting over the trauma. She meets new people and is forced (kindly) to think about more than just herself. Only a small portion at the end is about a new romance but that fills Freya and the reader with hope and joy. So while it’s heartbreaking to start with, the ending is sweet and cheerful.

Freya Scott has a great life. She has a great job as a brand manager of a multi-national drinks company, and she is engaged to her long-term boyfriend. Their wedding is the first of eight weddings of her friends this year. The day before her wedding, Freya's boyfriend cancels the wedding and breaks up with her. She is devastated as she had no idea that he wanted to break up. She is convinced that he will change his mind and she acts as if she is totally fine. Her best friends know that she will have a rough time going to the seven upcoming weddings so they design a series of outrageous tasks that she has to complete at each wedding. They hope that she will be so distracted at working on the tasks that she won't spend time dwelling on her breakup.

She spends some time at the wedding with a single man whom she shares the challenge with. He loves the idea of the challenges. She enjoys spending time with him at the wedding. I recommend this book.

I think what I enjoyed most about this book is that the concept was not far fetched from something that could actually happen. The day before Freya and Matthew’s wedding, Matthew calls things off. Freya is at the age when all of her friends are also getting married and she has seven weddings to attend to which would be rough after your own wedding fell through. What I enjoyed the most is seeing personal growth for Freya by learning to do things on her own and her friends rallying together to help her make it through the other weddings by creating challenges for her to complete at each wedding she has to attend.

Special thanks to NetGalley and publisher for a copy of the audiobook in exchange my pure honesty.

This was a DNF for me. I couldn’t get into it. I had high hopes, and I got to 25% but I just couldn’t listen anymore.

Freya is dumped by her fiancé, Matthew, the day before their wedding with little explanation. Unfortunately, this was also the year when seven friends are also getting married, and she must now navigate the wedding season on her own. Though the cover has the feel of a romantic comedy, this book is more about Freya's journey as she moves forward and grows with the help of family and friends-old and new. I really enjoyed the fun challenges her friends created for her and seeing her growth in the process. I would recommend this book to those that like relationship fiction.

The Wedding Season is an amazing book. Freya is so excited for her wedding but then her fiancé calls of the wedding.

Freya and her friends come up with making a wedding season task so she can get other about the wedding. She has so much wedding to go to.

I love how this book shows personal growth and it is okay to take as much time that you next to get through something.

Jaime was my favorite charter he brought the best out of Freya.

The audio of this book was amazing!! The narrator was amazing the pronunciation was amazing and very clear. The narrator played the emotions of the characters very well!!

Overall this book was amazing and so funny to read. It was a very funny and entertaining book. I definitely recommended reading this book!!

All I can say is this is so very entertaining on audio! I loved everything about it, the accents, the cast of characters, the storyline, the setting, ALL of it!
There were many laugh out loud moments that we can all relate to about friendships and relationships.
Freya Scott is getting married to Matthew, her long-term boyfriend...until she is not. Somehow she has to survive the breakup and eight weddings that follow. This is how the "Wedding Season" is created.
Fortunately, her friends have an idea! Together they devise a series of outrageous challenges for Freya to complete at each wedding, designed to distract her from Matthew and her heartbreak. These are things that she would normally never go along with, but she has to prove to herself and friends that she is fine. Along the way she discovers herself and that she is having fun as a single girl. There is a love/hate relationship with Jaime along the way and the ending is just perfect!
Thank you netgalley and the publisher for the advanced copy of this book!

The Wedding Season is a cute, light hearted romance had me laughing out loud. Freya is dumped the day before her wedding, which was to be the first of eight weddings of the season. She has to attended everyone else's weddings after. Freya was your perfect romcom character with lots of embarrassing hilarious moments. I listened to the audiobook and the narrator did a wonderful job at bringing this character to life. I recommend to those you enjoy reading Sophie Kinsella. Definitely will be watching for more by this author.


This review will be posted to goodreads. It will be mentioned on my TikTok and I'll leave a review on Amazon as well.

I absolutely loved this story.

Freya is so excited for the upcoming Wedding Season which she will be kicked off with her long- term boyfriend Matthew. However, the day before their wedding her fiance calls off it off. Freya is left feeling lost and broken, she is also unsure how she is going to survive the wedding season with 7 more weddings on her calendar.

He two best friends help her come up with a plan to help her enjoy the weddings an get back to her formal happy self.

Freya was not left at the alter. However, her fiance did call off the wedding hours before they were to be married. Unfortunately for Freya, she has several friends getting married during this season so try to "forget" about being left is not an immediate possibility. Freya's friends help her get through this by giving her tasks to complete during each wedding to help her to both forget that her fiance left her before her wedding and and to move on from him all together.

This was so cute! I just love Katy Birchall's humor. I think I laughed out loud more in this book than I have in a long time. I did the audiobook so I probably seemed like an unstable driver in my car laughing to myself....oh well! Worth it!

This book may have been the biggest surprise for me of the year. This book felt like I was hanging out with my best friends and I just wanted to be in this world. This book is so funny, sweet, romantic, and but also realistic.
This is more Womens Fiction with romance sprinkled in but for me the true romance of the book was the friendship soulmate connection of Freya and Ruby.

The Wedding Season follows Freya who is dumped before her wedding and has to find a way to get through the upcoming wedding season. Luckily she has amazing friends who help her come up a list of things she must do at the wedding. The scene where Freya, Ruby, and Leo create this list may be one of my favorite book scenes of the year and I was dying of laughter.

I loved Freya so much and how this book just felt like a huge character study on someone who has to reasses their whole life after their marriage falls apart. To see how different people deal with different types of grief resonated with me so much. I started this book on Kindle but ended up listening to most of it on the audiobook and that helped me get more into Freya’s mindset. Daphne Kouma did an insanely amazing job of narrating Birchalls writing and infusing it with even more humor, indecision, and confidence. I loved how we get to see Freya going back into her past and she tries to figure out her future and reasses and find new appreciation for all her relationships both romantic, familial, and friends.

This book also has Ruby who I need as a best friend and Leo who I need as a husband. They bring so much comedy but also heart and just true love and care about Freya that is just so pure and sweet.

I absolutely adored this book.

Thank you MacMillan Audio and Netgallet for this ALC for an honest review

this was a nice book with well developed characters. i found the friendships to be the strongest part of the novel and the romance to be the weakest.

You might think a book titled The Wedding Season is a romance novel, and you’d be both right and wrong. Primarily, the story is about what happens after Freya’s fiancé breaks up with her the day before their wedding. Freya’s friends rally around her and help pull her through some very hard times indeed - and that includes seven weddings over the course of the next few months. I just loved her friends, especially Ruby and Leo, who think up a sort of challenge for Freya, to help her survive all the upcoming weddings (including theirs!). They give Freya a task to complete at each wedding, something that is out of her comfort zone. This proves to be a very successful ploy at having something to distract Freya from mourning the end of her very long relationship with Matthew. In addition to Ruby and Leo, I loved Freya’s family members, especially her over-the-top mother. She was definitely good for a few laughs.

It was wonderful to follow Freya’s journey from broken-hearted to self-confident. This is my first book by Katy Birchall but I will now be on the lookout for others she has written.

I bounced between the audiobook and the ebook for this title, which was very convenient. The audiobook narrator, Daphne Kouma, was terrific, handling numerous voices and accents.

Thank you to Macmillan Audio and NetGalley for the opportunity to listen to an advance copy of this audiobook and to St. Martin’s Griffin and NetGalley for the opportunity to read an advance reader copy of this book. All opinions are my own.

Thank you netgalley, st. martin’s griffin, and katy birchall for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review! The wedding season is a fun and realistic novel that focuses on freya after her fiancée matthew calls off their wedding the day before. it shows how she learns to cope and heal from what’s happened with the help of her best friends.

I enjoyed the characters in The Wedding Season. The relationships were beautiful, fun, and believable.

The story was a bit lacking for me though, mostly because it was just so long. The pacing was anticlimactic, but the wit and humor of the characters saved the story for me.

The narrator for the audiobook was wonderful.

Thank you to Netgalley for the advance copy.

This was such a good book. Sweet and funny. Please somebody pick this up to make a romcom. Would be an excellent movie!