Review: Hey Ladies! by Michelle Markowitz and Caroline Moss

I love epistolary novels and I will have been mother of the bride and mother of the groom both in just over 2 years so this tale of a bride, her seven bridesmaids, and the year leading up to the wedding should have been exactly the kind of fluff and puff that I would devour right now. Instead, I hated it and forced myself to finish it. I am obviously not the age demographic (although neither are my daughter and soon to be daughter-in-law, Gen Zs that they are) but more importantly, I hope I'm not as snotty, self-centered, thoughtless, and, frankly, stupid as the characters in this book. And I certainly hope that there truly aren't women out there who are like these women, the worst one-dimensional caricatures of Millenials and bridezillas that I've come across.

Spanning a year of emails amongst a group of female friends, this novel in pieces is meant to show a humorous year of friendship, relationships, work, and general life. The emails start off with a New Years' Day message from Ali to her tribe offering up her resolutions for the year, squealing (you can practically hear it on the page) about her new boyfriend, and asking one of the group "if I go into [my new boyfriend's] bathroom and take photos of what's in his medicine cabinet, can you text your doctor friends really quick and tell me what his presciptions mean/what medical issues our potential children might have?" Clearly, I should not have persevered past this very first page. It is obviously exaggerated for comic effect, which might have been okay had it been done sparingly, but it wasn't. This made the novel unbelievable and annoying rather than funny. The women come off as dumb as stumps. Does one of them, who, incidentally, has a pretty impressive work title, actually believe that there's no wi-fi in Europe and therefore she won't be hearing from her boyfriend for the duration of his work trip? ::shudder:: In addition to coming across as airheads, these women are immature and awful. They are passive aggressive and competitive with each other. It boggles the mind why any one of them wants to be around any other one of them for any reason, never mind calling them the closest of friends, traveling together, spending obscene amounts of money on each other, and being in each others' weddings.

I would be horrified if my daughter or future daughter-in-law (or any of their friends, if I'm being honest) had any similarities with this entitled and ugly crew of women. It's hard to believe, but I did read every page of this, initially hoping it would smooth out and improve, and then in order to make sure my reaction was not outsized compared to the entirety of the story. It was not. This was not the read I hoped for. It was not cute. It was not funny. It makes complete sense that it has its origins on Twitter (and now I'm 100% skeptical of the quality of The Toast as well). Having finished this, I'm not entirely sure what to do with the physical book because I hate to to drop someone else's IQ with it or, at the very least, to doom them to such a terminally unfunny, ghastly read by putting it back out into the universe.