It’s the summer of weddings, and Freya Scott is ready. And that’s good, because it’s her wedding to Matthew that’s first on the calendar. It seems that all of her friends have found someone and are settling into married life around the same time, so her summer is packed with weddings. But hers is first, and as she’s finishing the preparations the day before the big day, Matthew shows up, needing desperately to talk to her. When he can’t find a moment’s peace, he pulls her into the cupboard under the stairs to say what he has to say.

He can’t marry Freya.

It takes a minute for Freya to understand the words he says and then another to believe him. But she finally comprehends that this man she was about to marry has ended their 12-year relationship the day before the wedding. In the cupboard at her father’s house with the vacuum cleaner and broom and who-knows-how-many spiders.

Freya sends her friends away, and the caterers and florist and peacocks, and she spends the weekend in bed. She spends another week at her dad’s house, working remotely, before she heads back to London and the flat she had shared with Matthew.

It’s her best friends Ruby and Leo, whose upcoming wedding closes out the year’s season, who come up with an idea to help Freya through all those wedding that loom in front of her. They set up a series of challenges that she will have to accomplish, one per wedding, with the final challenge to be decided. She’ll have to relieve someone of his cuff links, get a kiss, run naked down a hotel hallway, make a speech, and for the next wedding in her calendar, she will have to be the last one standing on the dance floor.

Freya immediately refuses, not being a great dancer, but Ruby insists. And that night, Freya has to choose whether to try to be the last one on the floor or not, deciding if she wants to be the pitiful woman who got dumped in the closet or if she wants to be someone trying to move forward. She decides to go for it, and as she bows to Ruby and Leo from the dance floor at the end of the night, Freya realizes that she had a good time. Nobody cared about her dancing skills, and her having a task to accomplish distracted her from the heartbreak of being at her friend’s wedding.

As the summer goes by, filled with hen dos (bachelorette parties, to Americans) and wedding after wedding, Freya finds herself fulfilling one task after another. She is still grieving, but she is also putting one foot in front of the other. She finds that she likes gardening. She binge watches The Great British Bake-Off. She focuses on work. She gets into a debate about whisky with a fellow wedding guest and dared him to a tasting. If she wins, she gets his cuff links. And despite his working for a brewery and sporting a beard, Freya won the tasting and that wedding’s challenge easily.

Freya often finds herself thinking back over her relationship with Matthew. She had been happy and ready to make that lifelong commitment to him, but was he really ready for that himself? Was he truly in love? Had he been happy?

Freya keeps moving forward, meeting her wedding challenges with courage and discovering new hobbies herself. She finds herself opening up to the idea of talking to her mother, who had left when she was young. She finds herself opening up, but when Matthew calls her wanting to talk, she finds herself wondering if he was going to try to repair things and get back together. If he does, should she give the relationship another try? Or should she just keep moving forward?

The Wedding Season is an utterly charming rom com that brings readers back to the best British romance movies of the ‘90s. These characters are interesting and three-dimensional, smart and motivated. The friendships are genuine, and Freya’s relationships with her father and brother (despite his misstep with the peacocks) is very sweet. While this is billed as a rom com, it’s also the story of a woman finding her way back from devastating heartbreak and learning to live again. Katy Birchall’s new novel is heart-warming and moving, and just everything you want from a book that has eight weddings in it.

I adored The Wedding Season. I was worried that the weddings would get repetitive, but they really didn’t. They each have their own venue and their own personality to keep them from getting dull. I loved Freya’s friends for coming up with the challenge ideas for the weddings, and her father and brother are amazing. But Freya herself is the one who steals this story. It’s her courage in light of the weddings and the challenges, her determination to keep moving forward, and her maturity in diving deeply into her emotions and communicating them clearly that gives The Wedding Season its true north. Anyone who has faced heartbreak will find a hero in Freya and find inspiration in her and her winning wedding speech (here’s to feet!).

Egalleys for The Wedding Season were provided by St. Martin’s Griffin through NetGalley, with many thanks.