It’s the weekend of your sister’s birthday and you’re excited to spend some time with your older brothers and sister one last time before heading to college. Everything is going to go according to plan, right? You couldn’t be more wrong.
Here’s more about the book
Charlie Grant’s older sister is getting married this weekend at their family home, and Charlie can’t wait—for the first time in years, all four of her older siblings will be under one roof. Charlie is desperate for one last perfect weekend, before the house is sold and everything changes. The house will be filled with jokes and games and laughs again. Making decisions about things like what college to attend and reuniting with longstanding crush Jesse Foster—all that can wait. She wants to focus on making the weekend perfect.
The only problem? The weekend is shaping up to be an absolute disaster.
There’s the unexpected dog with a penchant for howling, house alarm that won’t stop going off, and a papergirl with a grudge.
There are the relatives who aren’t speaking, the (awful) girl her favorite brother brought home unannounced, and a missing tuxedo.
Not to mention the neighbor who seems to be bent on sabotage and a storm that is bent on drenching everything. The justice of the peace is missing. The band will only play covers. The guests are all crazy. And the wedding planner’s nephew is unexpectedly, distractingly…cute.
Over the course of three ridiculously chaotic days, Charlie will learn more than she ever expected about the family she thought she knew by heart. And she’ll realize that sometimes, trying to keep everything like it was in the past means missing out on the future.
If you can tell from the description above, this book has a lot of stuff going on. First, it’s the big wedding of Charlie’s sister, Linnie. Then, there’s the end of the comic strip that their mother became famous for. Finally, there are a few unresolved issues amongst the family that need to be talked out.
All in all, the formula for just the sweetest and funniest book I’ve read by Morgan Mason.
This book really reminded me of that first scene in Home Alone, where the whole family is trying to finish packing for a huge family vacation. It’s pretty much everything up until Kevin wakes up to find that his entire family left him behind. They’re all running around and settling in and family from out of town is staying at the house. Everyone loves each other, but you know that there’s family that rags on each other and gives everyone a hard time. This is sort of that family.
And throughout the novel, each story comes into full circle. There’s the wedding planner who embezzled the engaged couple’s money and now Charlie and the new wedding team need to make everything come together. There’s the sort of estranged son who finally comes home for Linnie’s wedding. There’s the annoyed next-door neighbor that never really loved them. Then, there’s the news segment on Good Morning America for the family’s final comic strip.
The whole story reads so chaotically, but that doesn’t mean that it’s disorganized. Everything kind of falls into place slowly and as the moment when Linnie and Rodney say “I do,” almost everything imaginable that could go wrong at a wedding happens. Then, the segment with the family comes along and you think they’d get themselves together, but some families are just messy and funny like that.
The end of this novel made me cry. Rarely do novels make me cry, but lately I’ve been reading the one topic that always unleashes my emotions; family. Save the Date is most definitely about family bonds. It’s about what brings us together and what makes us try a little harder to connect with them.
I’ve lived in and around the New York City area for my entire life. We always get together for birthdays, anniversaries, special holidays, etc. Sadly at the end of summer, I’m planning to move the furthest my nuclear family has ever moved away from each other and this book felt like a little glimpse into that world.
It’s also about growing up. Charlie is the youngest in the family so she has fond memories of her older siblings. She’s finally going to have that quality time she’s been seeking since the last of her siblings left for college. Throughout the entire book Charlie is waiting for one of those classic sibling moments, but as she learns at the end of the story, sometimes life changes things but that doesn’t mean they are any less than family.
I absolutely loved this book and highly recommend it if you’re in the mood for a good read. Granted it took me a full week to read this, but I was also struggling with some pretty bad slump. It’ll probably take you way less time to read, enjoy, and even think about how unique your own family is.
- Hardcover, 417 pages
- Simon and Schuster (June 5, 2018)
- Rating: 5/5 Stars
- Buy Save the Date on Amazon
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