Abigail and Alexa Save The Wedding by Lian Dolan

Abigail and Alexa Save The Wedding by Lian Dolan

288 pages

Published May 2025

My copy courtesy of the publisher in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

Penelope and Chase make a lovely couple. She’s a bubbly Southern California girl with killer work ethic. Chase is smart and charming and has political aspirations. They’re planning a spectacular California wedding, wrapped in peonies and thousands of little white lights, soaked in custom cocktails and romantic hashtags. Everyone’s excited about Penny and Chase’s wedding­­­­­­—except their mothers.

The Mother of the Bride, suave Greek-born Alexa Diamandis, doesn’t understand why any woman would get married. Ever! Raised in Athens and now perfectly situated in sun-splashed Montecito, California, she raised Penny as single mother by choice, supported by Lord Simon Fox, her old college friend who just happens to be an English aristocrat, and a wealthy circle of lady friends who call themselves the Merry Widows.

The Mother of the Groom, Abigail Blakeman, is a garden club stalwart firmly planted in coastal Connecticut. She thinks the whole enterprise would be so much easier if the wedding was at their golf club. Especially because the Blakeman’s fortunes have taken a turn for the worse—not that you would ever know it by looking at Abigail. Keeping up appearances is exhausting, but it is everything.  

But when a sudden twist of fate calls them into action, these two very different women are forced to take over the wedding planning. Despite their differences, Alexa and Abigail charge in to save the day. How far will two moms go to make their children’s dream wedding a reality?

My Thoughts: 

This is Dolan's sixth novel and I've read them all. Her last, The Marriage Sabbatical, didn't work as well for me as her others, but I never considered that I was done with her writing and I'm glad I didn't. Abigail and Alexa brings Dolan back to what enchanted me with her writing in the first place. Dolan writes with a light touch, even when she's tackling some tougher subjects, her books are focused on her female characters and all of their relationships, and her locations always come alive. 

I love the way Dolan writes relationships between women: mothers and daughters, mothers and other mothers, and especially friend groups. In this book, Alexa, through her work, has earned a place in a friend group called The Widows; these women have formed their own family and will do anything to help family (and have the means to do so!). Abigail doesn't have that kind of friend group. She's spent her life trying to live a very particular kind of life and when finances chased her to the edges of that life, it meant that she had to give up the people she'd always spent time with and now feels friendless. Fortunately, as Abigail becomes more comfortable with who she is now, she also finds she has friends she can depend on when she needs them. And when Chase and Penelope call off the wedding, just as Alexa and Abigail begin to understand each other, they will both need all of their friends and connections to get the couple back together. 

In Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding, Dolan is back to California and I always feel like I'm getting a tour of the area by a friend who's lived there and loves it. Which is not to say that Connecticut and New York City don't always get their share of attention, but it's the Montecito area that's the star location of this one. 

Perhaps my favorite part of this book were the bridal columns (written by a friend of Abigail's) inserted throughout the book. As a person who is hoping to be a mother of the groom in the coming year, I actually found them to be packed with good information...and also really funny! 

Dolan's books are always the kinds of books that you know will have happy endings and when I pick them up, I pick them up looking forward to that. Characters I can cheer for, some quirkiness, all of the lovely details that make things come alive but never too many, and love (there is always love!) - Dolan never disappoints! 

Three Days In June by Anne Tyler

Three Days In June by Anne Tyler

176 pages

Published February 2025 by Knopf

My copy courtesy of the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary:

Gail Baines is having a bad day. To start, she loses her job—or quits, depending on whom you ask. Tomorrow her daughter, Debbie, is getting married, and she hasn’t even been invited to the spa day organized by the mother of the groom. Then, Gail’s ex-husband, Max, arrives unannounced on her doorstep, carrying a cat, without a place to stay, and without even a suit.

But the true crisis lands when Debbie shares with her parents a secret she has just learned about her husband to be. It will not only throw the wedding into question but also stir up Gail and Max’s past.

Told with deep sensitivity and a tart sense of humor, full of the joys and heartbreaks of love and marriage and family life, Three Days in June is a triumph, and gives us the perennially bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning writer at the height of her powers.

My Thoughts: 

I've been a fan of Tyler's for more than forty years now. While the past couple of her books that I've read have not had that spark for me that her work once did, they still had more than enough to recommend them and to keep me reading. So I'm always going to be ready to pick up another of her books, which is why I was excited to find this one available. 

Guys, Tyler is back for me! 

This book is only 176 pages long but it has everything in it that I've come to expect and appreciate from Tyler. Not only that, the compactness of it might very well be what makes it work best. We get the full story of Gail's life as we travel through only three days of her life. 

Gail is a bit of a prickly person. She wasn't the greatest mother (which puts her kind of out of the loop when it comes to her own daughter's wedding) and she wasn't the greatest wife. And just on the eve of her daughter's wedding, she finds out that she's also not the greatest people person, which is one of the reasons she's just found herself out of a job. But in just 176 pages, we come to really understand Gail and hope that things will work out for her. Not only that, but Gail comes to really understand Gail, which might seem implausible in such a short time, but with everything that's happening in that period, it's entirely believable. 

 It is lovely to see Gail reminisce about why she fell in love with Max and to forgive herself. Although there's a big event at the center of the story, it's the intimate details and the mundane that give the book its heart, which is where Tyler is at her best.

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

The Wedding People by Alison Espach

384 pages

Published July 2024 by Holt, Henry and Company, Inc. 

Publisher's Summary: 

It’s a beautiful day in Newport, Rhode Island, when Phoebe Stone arrives at the grand Cornwall Inn wearing a green dress and gold heels, not a bag in sight, alone. She’s immediately mistaken by everyone in the lobby for one of the wedding people, but she’s actually the only guest at the Cornwall who isn’t here for the big event. Phoebe is here because she’s dreamed of coming for years—she hoped to shuck oysters and take sunset sails with her husband, only now she’s here without him, at rock bottom, and determined to have one last decadent splurge on herself. Meanwhile, the bride has accounted for every detail and every possible disaster the weekend might yield except for, well, Phoebe and Phoebe's plan—which makes it that much more surprising when the two women can’t stop confiding in each other.

In turns absurdly funny and devastatingly tender, Alison Espach’s The Wedding People is ultimately an incredibly nuanced and resonant look at the winding paths we can take to places we never imagined—and the chance encounters it sometimes takes to reroute us.

My Thoughts: 

When the publisher says that Phoebe is at rock bottom, what they mean to say is that Phoebe has abruptly left her home and her job to travel to the Cornwall Inn to commit suicide. When she arrives, she discovers that the rest of the hotel has been taken over by a wedding party...and a bride who discovers Phoebe's plan and insists that Phoebe cannot do what she's come to do. Not because Lila is empathetic and longs to save a life. Nope, it's because Lila absolutely cannot abide the idea of having her wedding week ruined by such a thing. 

That's a hell of a way to start a book and I couldn't imagine where things were going to go from there. And I would really, really love to tell you what happens next. I raced through the book as Espach introduced us to the various wedding people, including bride Lila and groom Gary and as she looked back at what had brought Phoebe to this low point in her life. As I met most of the wedding people, my first instinct was that these characters were stereotypes, but none of them ended up that way; each of them got enough background and room in the book to show us who they really are. 

The Wedding People runs the gamut of emotions - from the tough beginning to humor, from sadness to frustration. It's more complex than it appears, but moves along a quick enough pace to keep things light. The ending could have been cliche. Did Espach lay out where things were going? Yes, but when it came time to conclude the book, it happened in a very realistic and more believable way. For me, this one was well worth the hype. 

Long Island by Colm Toibin

Long Island by Colm Toibin

Read by Jessie Buckley

9 hours, 40 minutes

Published May 2024 by Scribner

Publisher's Summary: 

Eilis Lacey is Irish, married to Tony Fiorello, a plumber and one of four Italian American brothers, all of whom live in neighboring houses on a cul-de-sac in Lindenhurst, Long Island, with their wives and children and Tony's parents, a huge extended family. It is the spring of 1976 and Eilis is now forty with two teenage children. Though her ties to Ireland remain stronger than those that hold her to her new land and home, she has not returned in decades.

One day, when Tony is at work an Irishman comes to the door asking for Eilis by name. He tells her that his wife is pregnant with Tony's child and that when the baby is born, he will not raise it but instead deposit it on Eilis's doorstep. It is what Eilis does-and what she refuses to do-in response to this stunning news that makes Tóibín's novel so riveting and suspenseful.

My Thoughts: 

I was first introduced to Colm Toibin when I read his book, Brooklyn, and it was there that readers first met Eilis Lacey and Tony Fiorello. I looked back at my review to that book to see if my feelings now about that book mirrored what I'd felt about it when I first finished reading it. They did. But I found something interesting in that review. I remarked that: Time moves at quite a pace in Brooklyn; Toibin bypasses long periods of time between episode and vignettes. Here, it felt very much the opposite. This is not a book that spans years, but rather weeks. But things also remain very much the same: Nothing showy or lush about Brooklyn. All of the emotion is just under the surface and yet it is palpable and the characters are believable and realistic. 

What would you do if you found yourself in Eilis' position? She has told Tony she will, under no circumstances, raise his child by another woman and she does not want it raised in the family. Unable to get confirmation from Tony that she won't have to see the child, she leaves for Ireland, ostensibly for her mother's upcoming 80th birthday. Although she hasn't been home in decades, there's a part of Eilis that longs for the place where she most comfortable; it certainly isn't on Long Island, surrounded by her Tony's extended Italian family where she still feels like something of an outsider. 

All of that contributes to what happens in Ireland when Eilis is encounters Jim, the man she fell in love with when she was last in Ireland and whom she left behind to return to Tony (who she was already secretly married to). Once again Eilis is torn between the settled life she has and the dream of a deep love she finds in Ireland. What might happen between Eilis and Jim is complicated by the fact that Jim is already engaged to one of Eilis' old friends and the arrival of Eilis' children, who have never met their Irish grandmother. 

There are a lot of twists and turns to this one and it is, to a great extent less about Eilis than was Brooklyn. Still, I enjoyed getting to know Jim and Nancy better and to get an even better look at Eilis' relationship with her mother. We spend a lot of time wondering if Eilis will, once again, return to Tony or will, this time, stay in Ireland. Still trying to process how I feel about the end of the book and if you look at other reviews, you'll find I'm not alone. 

I very much liked that Nora Webster (of Toibin's title by the same name) appears in this book, as Eilis' mother did in that book. Jessie Buckley's reading of Long Island is spectacular. I highly recommend listening to this one. Like Brooklyn, this one would make a good book club selection, as there is a lot to process here. It's appearing on "Best of 2024" lists, although, to be honest, I'm not sure it will make mine. I'm sure that has more to do with me than others giving Toibin the accolades he deserves for his body of work. 

The Marriage Sabbatical by Lian Dolan

The Marriage Sabbatical by Lian Dolan

288 pages

Published April 2024 by HarperCollins

Source: my copy courtesy of the publisher, in exchange for an honest review

Publisher's Summary: 

After twenty-three years of building careers and raising kids together, Jason and Nicole Elswick are ready for a break from their daily lives. Jason has spent years planning his dream sabbatical—ditching work for a nine-month-long motorcycle trip through South America. Problem is, that’s Jason’s dream, not Nicole’s. After years working retail and parenting in Portland, Nicole craves the sun of the Southwest and the artistic community in Santa Fe, where she wants to learn jewelry design.

A chance encounter at a dinner party presents a surprising—and intriguing—way out of their dilemma. Over a little too much wine, Jason and Nicole’s married neighbors sing the praises of the 500 Mile Rule: their policy of enjoying themselves however they wish—and with whomever they wish—when they’re temporarily far apart. It seems like the perfect solution: nine months pursuing their own adventures—with a bit of don’t-ask-don’t-tell—and then a return to their shared lives. It’ll be a sabbatical from their marriage as well as their day jobs.

As Jason bikes his way across a continent and Nicole reclaims the art she’s long neglected, they discover the pleasures and pitfalls of the 500 Mile Rule, confronting temptations of all kinds, uncomfortable truths about themselves, and gaining new perspective on their partnership.

But all sabbaticals come to an end…then what?

My Thoughts: 

When the publisher approached me about reading and reviewing Lian Dolan's latest book, there was no hesitation on my part, despite the fact that I had a lot of books I already needed to read and review. Dolan is a no-brainer for me; I've read and enjoyed all of her books. 

Here is what I know about them: 

• there will be humor 
• there will be relationships of all kinds to explore;
• the setting will become a part of the story;
• a look at marriage and what we know and don't know about the people we're married to;
• some of the characters will feel like stereotypes but it always feels like they are proving that there's a reason those stereotypes exist; and 
• and the ending will be exactly what you'd expect but also not the neat and tidy ending that always strikes me as so unrealistic. The Marriage Sabbatical gave me all of those things. 

**This is where I got to when my review apparently stopped saving and I'm struggling to recreate what I want to say, but I'll give it my best shot and cross my fingers that it saves this time. 

The Marriage Sabbatical gave me all of that as well as a couple of things I've never gotten from Dolan before. One was a man's point of view. The other was the premise of a married couple giving each other permission to have physical relationships with other people. It was this idea that came to Dolan first and then she created the book around that idea. But, if I'm honest (and I did say I would give the book an honest review), I struggled with this idea. From the idea of being separated from my spouse (and my children - although theirs are both overseas) for months on end with very little communication to the idea of either or both of us having intimate relations with other people, this was a tough one for me. It helped to find that both Jason and Nicole got what they needed from the experiment. I don't want to get too much into their relationships with others; but I was relieved to see that Dolan didn't make it easy nor without a little discomfort on both parties part. 

The stereotypes felt a little less organic this time around; the pieces just happening to fall into place a little less believable - a little more suspension of disbelief was required; and it felt, at times, a little too much like a PR piece for Santa Fe (although it was a good one - I really want to go there now!). 

Still, I liked the way Dolan explored all kinds of relationships, I liked that things didn't work out exactly how the characters expected them to work out, and I really liked Nicole rediscovering herself. She'd been in mom mode for so many years and for so long had felt like what she did for work was "less than." That's something so many women suffer from. She pushed herself out of her comfort zone, leaned into her strengths and found out how much they mattered to others, and gained a confidence in herself that showed in the way she presented herself. In the end, I got what I wanted - both an ending that is happy for the characters while also not being entirely tidy. 

This would make a really good book club selection - so much to discuss!