Okay, I’m about to complain; be warned.

I received an advance reader’s copy (ARC) of You May Now Kill the Bride by Kate Weston. Since this version is just a proof and not the final version, I won’t quote directly and will keep my comments general.

You May Now Kill the Bride by Kate Weston follows several women who have known each other since their school days. Now, they’re adults, and several of them are starting to get married, have kids, and so on. So when Tansy, the next bride-to-be, dies under mysterious circumstances during her hen do (bachelorette party, for the non-Brits), the survivors are forced to confront the fact that the dark secrets of their past might be revealed. They wonder if they can get away with what they did, and—more urgently—if they can even survive the next few weeks.

I’m just going to come out and say it. I did not like this book.

Yes, I could have stopped reading it, but reading this was the literary equivalent of watching a car crash: terrible to witness, but also hard to look away from.

Firstly, I disliked every single character. I think that was the point, to examine how toxic some friendships can be, and how they can lead to drama, betrayal, destruction, etc., but still. Everyone was selfish, unkind, and generally unpleasant. The only one I kind of liked was Lauren, but even her character development was only kind of okay, as she fought to gain some self-confidence and get over the (selfish, manipulative, annoying) man she’s been pining for fruitlessly for years.

Also, Weston’s writing style drove me up the wall. One of my main writing pet peeves is when a writer jumps around between perspectives randomly throughout a scene, and this book has that almost constantly. Anytime any of the bridesmaids are in the same room, the reader is pushed from one viewpoint to another between paragraphs. There are some books where this works, but those books usually have a different narrative voice, one that’s kind of aware of the audience and so breaks the fourth wall or at least is deliberately shifting around to various POVs. This, however, comes off more like amateur writing. I would have rather we stuck with one woman’s perspective per scene; I think we still would have been able to get the information we needed that way, and it wouldn’t have been annoying.

I also think I probably could have figured out who the murderer was, but I didn’t even care to try to solve this one. I was too distracted by how much I disliked the writing style and characters; mostly, I was morbidly fascinated with who might die next. Because again, I didn’t like anyone, and didn’t care if they lived or not.

So in the end, unless you really like stories where awful characters are awful to each other for three hundred pages, I don’t recommend You May Now Kill the Bride. Maybe this is a parody or a satirical look at what happens when friendships between women become toxic, but I didn’t enjoy it at all. Still, I finished it for some reason, and now I’m ready to move on.

You May Now Kill the Bride is available now.