I had the opportunity to read an advance copy of Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding (now available as May 20th, 2025). It is a fun, light novel for anyone who has recently been in (or is currently in the thick of) wedding things! I also think Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding would be a really fun book club book for women of a bunch of different ages (keep reading because I came up with discussion questions for just that!).

Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding Review

Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding is a novel that has a different perspective on weddings from the mother of the groom (MOG) and mother of the bride (MOB)’s point of views instead of the bride and groom perspective. Penelope and Chase’s mothers are not thrilled about their engagement, but in a twist of circumstance, they are forced to work together to take over the wedding planning. This is a much more character-driven book than plot-driven. I did think that this book had an opportunity to have a more dramatic climax or conflict, but the character development in this book was good and there were some fun characters in it.

It’s been a while since I got married (8 years! How!?), but I clearly remember the stressful planning process. And in a lot of ways, it wasn’t too much different from how people plan in 2025! This line by Abigail (the MOG), made me imagine what my mom probably thought when she was helping plan my wedding over 8 years ago lol

“You’re right about that.” Abigail shook her head and continued, “We didn’t take ourselves too seriously back then. Brides today, they want everything to be so special, so unique. Not my generation. We did what our mothers told us to do. We were perfectly happy with the same wedding that everyone else had. The white Tiffany invitations. The Priscilla of Boston dress. Our sisters or prep school friends as bridesmaids in Laura Ashley. We all did our own hair and makeup. Rehearsal dinners were for the wedding part, not everyone we ever knew. The basic country club wedding with a decent band, forgettable food, and lots of booze was fine. And we left for our honeymoon right after the wedding, no Sunday brunch.”

“Did you take a covered wagon?” Sarah mocked gently.

Page 82, Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding

Last year, I read The Marriage Sabbatical by Lian Dolan, so I did find it kind of funny that The Marriage Sabbatical was a look at an “unconventional” marriage practice, versus Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding was all about the traditional institution of marriage. However, both are heavily focused on the themes of marriage and family in different ways. I actually found the moral of both to be somewhat similar. In The Marriage Sabbatical, you could argue that the big moral is that you don’t have to do your marriage just like everyone else, sometimes you have to do things that work the best for you. In a similar way, the young characters in Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding (Chase and Penny) find that they don’t have to do their wedding like all of their friends. Plus, the mothers also come to peace that their children’s wedding may be better without it being exactly like they envisioned it.

The Marriage Sabbatical by Lian Dolan: Book Review

I think this book would be an EXCELLENT book club book for women who have grown children who are getting married because it would be highly relatable. I also think this would be a funny book club book for women who are younger and getting married, because it pokes fun at some of the crazy things that happen, trends, and the headache of planning a wedding. If you decide to make this your next book club book, you’re in luck because I came up with some discussion questions to guide the conversation in relation to this book and weddings!

“The key to any successful relationship is to keep growing and changing. And admitting mistakes when it’s the right thing to do. And forgiving whenever you can.”

Page 229, Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding

I gave Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding 4/5 stars. Lian Dolan has a way of making me laugh with her writing and she definitely captured a lot of the funny things of planning a modern wedding. I especially found Abigail’s character funny because she was a classic boy mom and “WASP”. There’s similar attitudes between northeastern/New England women and women in the south (the world I live in!) in the sense of being obsessed with keeping a certain appearance and being a bit fake in order to keep that.

Interview with Author Lian Dolan

Here’s some snippets from my interview/conversation with Lian Dolan. We talked about Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding, writing, and modern wedding trends. It was such a fun talk and I laughed a lot, so be sure to listen to the full thing! The full interview with Lian is available on YouTube!:

Sara Ann: I saw you wrote in the acknowledgements [of Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding], that you were kind of inspired during COVID, right?

Lian Dolan: Yeah, I mean, we were all just sitting at home scrolling, right? I did cook up this idea in 2021. 
I was putting together two book ideas for my editor, William Morrow. One was the book that came out last year, The Marriage Sabbatical, which is a look at a Gen X marriage. 
And then I was thinking, well, what else do I enjoy? It’s sort of a companion piece, but it’s not a series, they’re totally different books. And weddings just were top of mind because there was that one weird period in 2021 when we thought, ‘it’s over! 
The pandemic is over!’ And then the Delta variant came back and it wasn’t over. But everybody I knew got married. 
Like even my friends got remarried, that summer. And I thought, you know, I’ve always loved weddings. I’ve always been fascinated by just the hoopla surrounding weddings, but also, you know, what it means for our future. 
And so that’s when I thought, okay, I think I’ll pitch a wedding book.

Sara Ann: When did you start writing this book [Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding]? 
Because I’m always so interested in how long it can sometimes take from initial idea spark to writing, to the revisions, to actually getting to publishing. So what did that timeline look like, for this book?

Lian: I pitched two books in the fall of 2021 and the editor bought both books. 
So it’s a high class problem to have. It’s great to know what your work life is going to look like for the next three or four years. So first I wrote The Marriage Sabbatical and then, so I pitched this book and I put it aside like I put the 10 page pitch document aside. 
I didn’t really think about it for another 18 months because I had to write The Marriage Sabbatical, and then that had to come out. And then last year, I was like, “oh God, I’ve got to write that other book!”. So I started, I had to just refresh myself. 
Like, ‘what was the story again? Oh, yeah, that’s right. It’s all coming back to me’. 
Because you get so immersed in one narrative. It’s hard to make the switch. So last year, it took me about 12 months to write this, start to finish, I would say, with maybe 14 months if I include all the edits and everything like that. 
But I got the bulk of the writing done at about seven months, and then you go through the back and forth with the first round of notes from your editor and the second round of notes and the copy-writing. But it took about seven months. But during that time, I was also touring with The Marriage Sabbatical. 
And so I was doing something I don’t like to do, which is two things at once. Like I like to either talk or write. I don’t like to write and talk on the same day. 
I would have to go to book tour stops and like spend the six hours in the morning writing the wedding book and then go out at night and talk about the marriage book. But I got it done. I got it done.


Were there any big parts of the story that got changed during the writing process?

Lian: There was…. 
Here’s the thing… happens every time. I don’t know why it surprises me every time. But when you put together a pitch document for your editor or a publishing house, it’s about 10 pages, you know, and you have to tell them the beginning, the middle, the end. 
You’re doing paragraph outlines of the major characters and describing some of the minor characters. You’re even including like signature scenes and dialogue in that pitch, right? So it feels like the book is done, really, after 10 pages, but then you go to write and you’re like, oh, I need to add 300 more pages… I need a little more story here. Because initially I was just going to follow like the calendar of a wedding, like the engagement, the engagement party, oh, the wedding venue, the dress shopping, but I realized it’s kind of tedious. 
I need more and so that’s where kind of the caper came in. That’s sort of you have in the middle of this book, and the turnaround with the two mothers needing to work together. Like, I knew that there was going to be interaction, but I hadn’t really figured out that major plot point. 
So it was only when I started in on this. I’m like, oh, yes, actually something more has to happen for like 100 pages in the middle of this book. That was a pretty major change. 
And then what always happens to me is I will start to write side characters, and they’re just so fun to write and then they really come alive after a couple scenes. You’re like, ‘oh, give them a few more scenes!’. So I was happy that, you know, there are love stories to be had throughout this book that are not necessarily the bride and groom. 
And that happened a couple of times in this book that I added more romance and more possibility for romance in the book.


Sara Ann: So you’re from Connecticut and now you live in California. So it probably felt pretty natural to write these characters, right, with Abigail being from Connecticut and Alexa in California?

Lian: It was, yes… This is my sixth novel that I’ve written and I think I get better with every novel as a writer, you know, I learned my craft more. I know some tricks of the trade. 
I sort of understand the assignment a little bit better. So I do feel like the characters of Abigail and Alexa are fully realized characters you know, in previous books I’ve had the mother character older women, you know, that would be 50 plus in the publishing world. You know, they’ve been enjoyable to write, but this time I had to write the whole book around these two characters. 
And so I really needed to understand who they were, their life experience. I usually do for main characters, I’ll do a two or three page character sketch. So you know, before I start writing them, I’ll know: Where do they grow up? 
What did they like to eat as kids? You know, where did they go to college? Who were their first boyfriends? 
Like, I have all that information down, so I give them like a fully realized life. And I think that’s particularly important with older female characters, where so many you see in so much pop culture, that’s not necessarily written by women. Just these really one note older women characters. 
You know, it’s like they had no personality or life before they became a mother and now they’re just grandmothers in a sweater, you know. I mean, that sounds like a good life being a grandmother in a sweater, but like most of the women I know have more complicated lives than that.

I was able to kind to put into Abigail, the person from Connecticut, the mom from Connecticut, you know, my own mother, a lot of the women I knew growing up, now my friends who still live back in my hometown, like I was able to sort of infuse a lot of Abigail with women like that. And then for Alexa, who lives in Montecito… I picked Montecito before the Duchess moved there, just for the record. 
I wasn’t trying to capitalize on the Duchess I didn’t know they were flee the country and move to Montecito when I chose that. But it was because I have been, I do a lot of speaking women’s organizations and women’s clubs here in Southern California and I had been invited to this very lovely club in Montecito multiple times. And the women at this place just really, really impressed me. And I was like, there’s a story here. 
Like, these, I mean, first of all, the clothes, the fashion, the hair, the maintenance, unbelievable. Unbelievable on all fronts, but also, like fascinating, interesting vibes, you know, complicated family lives and stuff. I mean, they would share a lot with me at these luncheon tables afterwards. 
So I thought I have to do justice to this interesting group of women who live here in Montecito.

Sara Ann: When you were writing the book, what were you kind of hoping for people to feel and think while they were reading?


Lian: Two things. 
First, I mean, I love a wedding. I have been reading the wedding announcements in the New York Times since I was seven years old. You know, it was like a family thing that we did together on Sunday mornings. 
Reading about the weddings of people we did not know. And we enjoyed that, and my whole life, I still start every Sunday with reading the wedding announcements. 
So I wanted people to just remember kind of the purpose of weddings, and that’s to join two people who love each other. But it’s become this giant wedding industrial complex now, where every decision is monogrammed and programmed and Instagrammed and it’s such a production. You know, we used to have sort of very simple rules for how weddings went, but now the rules are determined by social media and the aesthetic. I just find it fascinating and also a little disturbing. 
You know, I feel a lot of pressure for brides. Like, I feel bad for them, that they have so much pressure on them to not only create a day that special and meaningful for two people and the families around them, but for all of the internet. You know, that just doesn’t seek fair. 
So I wanted people to think about what is actually the meaning of a wedding ceremony, like, what does that mean? It means love, a future, it means people coming together; families coming together. And for one day, you’re just hoping and praying that everyone behaves themselves. 
You know, so I wanted, that was primary.

The other thing is, I feel like this is really a book about the importance of female friendships as we age. You know that the fact that the mothers can come together, but also you meet this whole cast of characters, both women have support groups on either side. 
Teams of friends and people that help pull this whole thing off. And that was hugely important to me because I think, you know, there’s this idea that we’ve made our friends in fourth grade and we never can make new friends again after that. I mean, that’s great. 
If you still have your best friend from fourth grade, that’s awesome, but there are many other ways to sort of reach out socially and connect socially and at some point I think, particularly as women age, the barriers to friendship that might have stood before in your 30s, 40s, just filled with self judgment and self doubt. Like, by the time you’re 50 or 60, you don’t care anymore, Sara Ann, you stop caring.

Sara Ann: [laughing] Well, that’s good to know.

Lian: That’s what you have to look forward to, you know, the barriers to friendship kind of break down. And you’re able to see people for their true selves, their authentic selves. And so that was the two messages that, you know, weddings matter on a plane that’s very deeply spiritual to me. 
And also that friendships matter.

Sara Ann: You said that you have adult sons, right? 
And they’re not married yet? So if and when that day comes, who do you think you’ll identify more with: Abigail or Alexa?

Lian: I’m a touch of both. Being from Connecticut, there are things I really like done a certain way. Like, I like things in proper alignment, I like some protocols in place. But I also appreciate sort of the no rules aspect of California where it’s sort of… anything goes. 
I like to think that I would.. not to dodge a question… but I like to think that I would be able to thread that needle right down the middle, you know, impose a little bit of structure if called upon as the mother of the groom. But also be open to whatever the young couple wants. 
I did learn, I mean, I really immersed myself in the wedding culture to write this book, which was super fun. Like, I can’t tell you how many Instagram accounts I now follow that are wedding planners, wedding etiquette poeple, wedding dress designers. And then, you know, I subscribe to all the newsletters from Brides and Martha Stewart wedding and blah, blah, blah, and then just like as, you know, wedding etiquette experts, I dug deep on. 
And so I do feel like I’m poised and ready, but one of the things, the fact that really kind of shocked me and gave me pause as the mother of two boys, is that the mother of the groom is not officially in the wedding party. The mother of the bride is. You know, if we’re going way back to wedding etiquette. 
So that’s why the mother of the groom has traditionally has been told to just wear beige and shut up, right? That’s the that’s the adage that my mother said 40 years ago when my siblings started getting married, and, you know, everyone repeats that the mother or the groom, you’re just supposed to wear beige. Wear beige, stand back, and shut up. 
But it’s because you’re not technically a member of the wedding party.

Sara Ann: In reading the book, it was so clear to me that you like really immersed yourself in like all the trends and stuff… what do you think is like the wildest modern wedding trend, in your opinion?

Lian: Well, I’ll say this. There seems to be a tremendous amount of pressure on the bridal party to dance. 
You know what I mean? Like, they have to have these choreographed entrance dances and there’s and all these Instagram videos prove that most 95% of them cannot really dance at all. So I’m like, why? Just let them walk into the wedding! 
Can’t they just walk? I just don’t understand, like a lot of bad choreography and bad dancers in weddings.

So that, but I think it also leads me to like my son and his girlfriend were at a wedding recently and they said, ‘oh, they did the bridal entrance three times for the videographer‘. Like three takes! And that’s crazy, Sara Ann. Like, that it takes you so out of the moment. 
It was a very, like, done for social media wedding. And I think that that has escalated this wedding party dance choreography mandatory. Everything has to be a moment. But when I heard that, I was really fascinated by that these things are all takes. 
So, I wish the wedding party, if they choose to dance, that seems fine. If they don’t want to like dance into the reception, you really shouldn’t have to. I like the choreographed dances though for bride and grooms. 
I think that’s good. A little nudge of choreography. I think that makes a lot of sense because most people are not taught formal dance and that song can go on forever. 
But the bridal party? Just let them be. And then I would say that. That’s that’s probably when I understand the least. 


Sara Ann: You said you were married. How long have you been married for?

Lian: I’ve been married 32 years. 


Sara Ann: So throw it back 32 years. Aunt B in the book, she said we shouldn’t use the term bride-zilla, so I’m going to take her advice and use the term difficult bride. 
But do you remember being a difficult bride when you were planning your own wedding or do you remember having like at least one really difficult moment?

Lian: I had one bad moment. It was actually at the wedding. I just felt like the caterer wasn’t… I didn’t have a wedding planner. Here’s what happened, Sara Ann. My husband and I we got engaged in three months. 
Like, we just decided, sure, let’s get married. And so after three months of dating, we got married … like six months after that, I had to move to a different city. We didn’t have a giant wedding planner. 
We didn’t have, it wasn’t a complicated wedding… I have a very large family, so mainly, they were the guests. So it was very DIY in a very simple way. 
But I wish I had had a wedding planner because I was mad at the movement of the hors d’oevres at the wedding. I remember, going into the kitchen. Why isn’t anything being passed?! That was a bad moment. 
I will say it, that was a bad moment. But I didn’t feel the pressure a lot of modern brides. The whole thing just seemed so fun. 
It was so risky. I barely knew this guy.

Sara Ann: Well, it clearly worked out!

Lian: 
It worked out but it could have gone the other way, you know, I realized after our 1 year anniversary, I got really lucky because this is really a lot being married and if I didn’t like this guy, that’d be bad. So, but I think that was definitely my worst moment. I will give myself a lot of credit. 
We divvied up the tasks, and my husband who’s in real estate, and lived here Pasadena where we got married. He was in charge of getting a photographer and then I was like ‘great, you know, check off the list’. And so finally I said, like, a week away from the wedding, he said ‘it was a guy I work with’. 
And I eventually I said ‘so wait a minute, he’s a real estate photographer?.. Who is shooting the wedding?’ that this man goes, ‘oh, will he normally does aerial photography’. I was like, ‘…and he’s shooting the wedding?’. It was too late to change. 
I’m like, okay. I mean, I envision like the whole wedding being shot from, you know 5000 feet. But anyway, he did a fine job. But wedding photography was different back then. It’s much better now… except there’s a lotof it. But it’s much more informal now and things like that. We had a lot of posed photos… a few candids. We got three or four good shots out of it. So that’s all we needed.

Sara Ann: Would you have been as trusting as Penny was and let your mom and mother-in-law plan your entire wedding? 


Lian: Oh, no. My mother, yes, but not my mother-in-law. You know, my mom was good at this stuff. 
She thrived in this world. She did all my flowers. She dried hydrangeas. I got married in January the day after the Rose Parade here in Pasadena. So I had a florist who did my bouquet and everything. 
But for the tables, my mother collected and dried all these beautiful hydrangeas and shipped them and then how to whole group in her hotel room, putting the wedding things together with the flowers. And what we lucked into, we didn’t realize what the flowers at the church, they’re still up for the holidays. So we didn’t have to do the church at all. So my mom was good at this stuff and she just said… ‘all-white wedding’. 
All the bridesmaids, the flower girls, everyone was in white. 
She knew what she was doing. She was good at this stuff.

Sara Ann: I know you probably couldn’t share much if so, but are you working on anything right now that we can kind of keep our eyes out for in the future, like any new books?

Lian: I’ve written four books in five years. It was a very fertile, creative period for me. 
So I am a little slow. I’m done with all my contract books and everything. So I am working on something. 
It’s a little bit different for me. It’s a little bit broader scope. I’m going slowly with it. 
It’s not sold yet. There’s no update or anything. I’m just is my agent listening? 
Because she’s been bugging me for pages. So did she set this up? [laughing]

It’s the story of a friendship told over decades. So it’s a little bit different for me, it has a touch of historical fiction in it because I guess the 80s are history now. 
Is that correct? I’m surprised to hear that, but apparently it is. 
So I’m working on that.

Sara Ann: Is there anything else you want to plug or promote right now?

Lian: I am going to be in a lot of cities. 
I love seeing people. My book tour starts on May 20th and Iiandolan.com, you can find the events page. I’m going to be here in California and then I’m going to be in Carmel, Indiana and the Jersey Shore and Newport, Rhode Island; New York City; Mystic, Connecticut. 
So a lot of events between mid-May and June.

Discussion Questions for Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding

If you have children who have gotten married, which mom did you most identify with? Or did your own mom and mother-in-law have characteristics of Abigail or Alexa?

Do you think that Chase actually seemed like an equal partner kind of guy? Or was that all talk?

Would you have left all of the wedding planning into the hands of your mom and future MIL like Penny did?

How do you think you would have responded to your family intervening on your broken engagement?

Were there any lines in this book that made you laugh?

Mine was this one:

“I’m sorry that Sarah had to get that van back to the lacrosse team in Connecticut,” Frannie said. “Or else she would whoop it up and screen, ‘LFG!'”

“What does that even mean?” Roxanne asked.

“I don’t know. But something good.”

The women all toasted with their coffees. “LFG!”

Page 225, Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding

If you are married, do you remember being a Penny/Bride-zilla/”difficult bride” (a-la Aunt B) at your own wedding? If you weren’t one the entire planning process, what was your one bridezilla moment (I know you have one)?

What is the biggest bride-zilla moment you have ever witnessed in attending or being a part of weddings?

Don’t forget to order Abigail and Alexa Save the Wedding available May 20th, 2025!

This post may contain affiliate links. Please see policy page for more information. Thank you to Wunderkind PR for the advance copy of this book!