The Big Chill meets About Time in this laugh-out-loud funny and equally heartbreaking novel, following a friend group so damaged that only a funeral could bring them back together. Perfect for fans of The Wedding People and One Italian Summer.

When Babe—the complicated, magnetic matriarch of their teenage summers—dies, four estranged friends return to sleepy Mercy Island, a storm-swept stretch of coastal Georgia, summoned by the reading of her will.

Didion arrives at the timeworn pink house to find the friends she never thought she’d see again—along with the tensions, attractions, and unfinished business that once bound them together and broke them apart.

What should be a brief weekend of small talk quickly unravels when they wake up and discover…it’s Saturday. Again. And again. And again.

Trapped in a time loop with no end and no instructions, they’re forced to confront the betrayals, breakups, and buried truths that shattered them all those years ago. Because maybe, just maybe, an endless weekend is exactly what they all need to save their own lives.

I received an advance copy of this book courtesy of the publisher. All thoughts are my own.

I always know I’m in for a good time when I pick up a Paige Harbison book, and this one didn’t let me down.

The story kicks off when Babe, the magnetic, larger than life mother to sisters Didion and Sammie, dies. Her death pulls four estranged friends back to Mercy Island, a quiet, storm battered stretch of coastal Georgia, for the reading of her will. Didion shows up at Birdsong, her family’s timeworn pink house, expecting an awkward weekend of small talk with people she never planned to see again. What she gets instead is a lot more complicated. Old attractions resurface, old wounds reopen, and all the unfinished business that once tied this group together and eventually tore them apart comes right back to the surface. Then things get strange. The group wakes up the next morning to find it’s Saturday again. And then again. And again. Trapped in a time loop with no explanation and no way out, they’re forced to actually deal with the betrayals and buried secrets that broke them apart in the first place before they can move forward.

The friend group here is the real strength of the book. Every single character felt authentic, with real flaws and real history behind them. Didion especially stood out to me. She’s guarded to the point of being genuinely hard to like sometimes, and I mean that as a compliment. She’s not smoothed out or made easy to root for just because she’s the main character. I related to her a lot, honestly. I can be just as prickly and closed off when I’m protecting myself, so watching her slowly let her guard down to friends she felt distanced from felt honest rather than convenient for the plot. The dynamic between Didion and her sister Sammie added a whole other layer, and their friends Austin and Matt rounded out the group nicely, giving the whole cast more texture than your average friend group ensemble. Even Birdsong itself practically became its own character. I’ll admit it, I wanted to move in.

I’m also a sucker for a good time loop story, so this premise was right up my alley from the start. Watching them get stuck reliving the same day over and over, and slowly using each reset to peel back another layer of what actually happened between them and how they could move forward, was a lot of fun. The Groundhog Day structure works well for most of the book. Each loop reveals something new, and there’s real momentum built into watching these characters figure out what to do with a weekend that refuses to end.

Where it stumbles a tiny bit is in the last 1/4 or so. Time loop stories almost always hit a point where the device starts to feel repetitive, and this one is no exception. By the last few resets, I felt the story stalling instead of building. I think trimming one or two loops would have tightened the pacing considerably and kept that momentum going all the way through instead of letting it sag right before the ending. I also kind of wished we’d gotten chapters from all four characters instead of just Didion. I feel like that would have fleshed things out even more.

I did an immersive read on this one, listening and reading at the same time, and it was a great choice. The author narrates the audiobook herself and does a genuinely fantastic job bringing the story to life.

Even with the feeling of repetition toward the end, I had a genuinely good time with this book. The characters carried it, and the emotional payoff by the end felt real, even if the road there got a little long. If you’re a fan of complicated friend group stories, and you don’t mind a time loop that overstays its welcome by a beat or two, this one is worth picking up.

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