loooved the chaos 4,5/5 ⭐️

<blockquote><b><i>" You don't get to freeze the picture when you want it. It would have been living in the past and eventually, you just start doing the same jokes over and over again."</i></b></blockquote>One of the things I love the most about Morgan Matson’s writing is how she develops the relationships within the story – be it friendship, family or romantic. They are always natural and well developed and she always manages to work some important issue within their plotlines. I dare say that these bonds are always the protagonists of her books and I love it. And although there is some inevitable drama, the characters manage to communicate and solve their problems without elongating the issue to carry the story or that plotline through the entire book. The romances are always well developed as well and they evolve in a realistic, fun and light way, and I love how the couple compliments each other so well. Both novels I’ve read from her were a kind of ‘coming of age’ story and though I’m not overly fond of those, they are always done in this very heartwarming and deeply relatable way. So, as I was going into this book, I was expecting all of the above things, with the bonus of this funny, rom-com feel, wedding-gone-wrong background – and thart’s not what I found at all, so it was a little bit disappointing. First of all, Charlies is super immature and irritating. She’s so desperate to have her ‘perfect weekend’ with her perfect family (that whole debacle got tiring and fast) that she not only treated a lot of people poorly, she completely alienated and forgotten her best friend (there go the strong, amazing friendships). <spoiler>The way she treated her own brother and her other brother’s girlfriend (who was mostly uncomfortable and lost during the entire novel and was constantly pushed away and alienated by the entire family, including her boyfriend, even when she tried to help and participate) was just ridiculous and the fact that she defended how assholic her brother ways toward that girl until almost the end of the book left me very very angry.</spoiler> And the family relationships, who were supposed to be the focus of the novel, was not even that well developed and worked – mainly because there were so many characters that it was impossible to work through every relationship and develop the bonds, and it wasn’t clear by the end why Charlie wanted that final perfect weekend and how strong their bond was, why this family was so special. So I didn’t really get attached to any of the characters. They didn’t resonate with me at all because everything was super shallow and just hinted at. And the fact that Charlie focused so badly in making everything run smoothly, she misses obvious stuff that is happening right under her face and are supposed to be the big ‘twists’ of the book – except they are completely obvious to the reader from the start and when they are revealed, it’s only surprising to the main characters. And I didn't even got started with the romance, one of the highlights of the previous novels by Matson. Charlie spends the ENTIRE book with someone and the real love interest...well, we only realized he was the main interest with 100 or so pages left and she barely interacted with him. So, that was lost in the story. It was more a hint of a possible future romance than something that was a real plotline. The writing here didn’t help, though – the novel is set in a space of two days, so things couldn’t be properly developed without cramming little scenes and interactions and making it unnecessarily longer than it already was. Things happened too quickly and felt super rushed and were resolved equally quickly, and everything that could go wrong DID, to a point that it stopped being funny and started being ridiculous and unreal. By the end, I felt like I’ve read a novelization of a bad teen movie. Another thing that didn’t work: the humor. There weren’t that many funny scenes in the story BUT I loved how she inserted the comic strip and made parallels between what was happening in the story and in the comics, and it also made the Grand Central Station’s end plotline more real. I also LOVED the cameo from characters from previous books (my shipper's heart DIED when Andie and Clark appeared!) and there were some funny scenes with them involved. It wasn’t a good year for my YA contemporary favs, which is a shame, because I always feel good while Reading both Morgan Matson and Kasie West’s books. But I’ll continue to wait ansiously for their next books, despite these two disappointments.