The Wedding People

By Alison Espach

☕︎☕︎

Okay, I know. This book is beloved. A hit. The one everyone insists you have to read—you’ll love it, they say.

And I’ll be totally transparent: Even after I finished it, I still recommended it to a few close friends because I knew they would love it. And they did. But me? I didn’t. I really didn’t. This book was incredibly disappointing.

It starts off with the main character—oh-woe-is-me Phoebe—heading to a resort to commit suicide. But the setup makes no sense. We’re told she’s a brilliant researcher with a PhD, and yet she decides to end her life with her cat’s leftover pills. Really? And she chooses to do this in a crowded resort, where the likelihood of traumatizing the staff is sky high, all while being supposedly reclusive and pandemic-shy. None of it tracked.

The novel takes serious mental illness and renders it light and breezy, like something you could solve with a good walk, a mimosa, and a stranger’s pep talk. It tries to wrap trauma in whimsy, but it ends up feeling flippant and, frankly, careless. Phoebe’s depression and suicidal ideation are treated more like quirky character traits than the devastating, complex realities they are. It reads as if the book wants credit for tackling Big Topics, but it refuses to give them the emotional weight or grounding they deserve. There’s a huge difference between writing about mental illness with levity and reducing it to plot convenience. This book, for me, veered hard into the latter.

And then, of course, Phoebe falls in love. Naturally. Because why wouldn’t a hot, charming, emotionally intelligent doctor—who’s literally getting married in a few days—fall head over heels for a woman he’s just met, who spends most of the book drunk, unbathed, and emotionally closed off? It’s not just that their connection is unrealistic—it’s that the novel asks us to root for it without doing the work. There’s no real development, no chemistry that feels earned. It’s just another trope layered onto a book that already doesn’t seem to know what it wants to be: a romance? a grief memoir? a satire? a redemption arc? It touches all those bases, but never actually rounds them.

This book didn’t work for me on almost any level. The characters felt like sketches, the tone was uneven, and the plot teetered between implausible and absurd. I know people love it—it hits the sweet spot for readers who enjoy a little melancholy with their magical realism—but for me, it felt like a book that wanted to be profound without being honest. And that gap was too wide to cross.

This book is bad. People really love it though.