Have you ever been through a time when life was coming at you with one crazy event after another and you thought, “this could be a book?” Making March by Hayley Walsh reflects one of those crazy periods in her lighthearted women’s fiction novel. I previously interviewed Walsh in 2020. After winning a copy of her book in a giveaway, I was excited to read the book behind the intervivew. Here is my review of Making March below.
Making March plot summary
On February 1, 2017, Kate Cutta-Bollsoff turns 40 years old. She’s divorced and living with her moody teenage daughter, Heidi. She has also procrastinated until the shortest month of the year to prepare for her best friend, Heather’s, wedding.
Also celebrating Heather’s wedding are Kate’s wild sister Jenny and her cousin Nicole, rich snob Tracy, Rachel, her husband’s girlfriend, Heather’s flirt of a mom, Marie, and her own mother. These women take up a lot of space in Kate’s journal as their personal craziness takes over the wedding and the events leading up to it.
Over the next 28 days, Kate chronicles February’s adventures in her journal, from online dating to pre-wedding events. This includes plenty of time spent with her ex and the girlfriend he left her for. Kate’s journal fills with anecdotes about dating, motherhood, and womanhood as she survives one crazy situation after another.
Journal storytelling
Kate’s story is told exclusively through journal entries. Sometimes she writes multiple times a day. This keeps the reader caught up on the larger story while Kate goes off on tangents about various first-world problems. She writes about everything from menstruation to divorce, diving down the rabbit hole of trivial opinions and reflections.
A once aspiring actress and singer, Kate regularly references hit movie titles and Broadway shows to draw comparisons to her own life. Her voice is conversational, realistic, and energetic. She seems like someone you would know from your own life.
Because of its limiting style, Making March is a very character-driven story marked more by Kate’s reactions to everyday life. It’s meant to be relatable to female readers who are also in or nearing their 40’s and have trouble shedding pounds, dealing with family drama, and finding love.
An unlikable hero
Despite her candid and playful voice, Kate comes off as an ultimately unlikable woman. It’s not that she’s evil or mean. She’s just self-absorbed. You could probably say this about a lot of people if you got to know them only by their journal entries.
Journals are where you go to vent. But this is a journal that is handed over to the reader. The reader is even addressed as if Kate is speaking to them directly rather than just writing her thoughts in a notebook. And it’s not always a flattering depiction of our hero.
Kate never undergoes a character arc. She doesn’t recognize or admit to any of her flaws. And she’s never faced with any kind of test that she needs to pass. When things go south for her, big or small, she never assesses the giant part that she played in their culmination.
Her essays feel more like complaints than observations. They also reveal a lot about her less admirable qualities: her laziness, shallowness, and inability to empathize with others.
However, Kate’s egocentric thoughts are relatable to most of her target audience. They’re topics that we’ve all thought about, cursing the scale or dealing with a cold or razor burn. They just run on in much longer rants that paint her in an unflattering light at times. But it does add entertainment value to the story as a whole. You don’t always have to like a character in order to root for them.
Character relationships
Kate also has a lot of enemies that populate her life. From her cheating ex-husband and Rachel to her misunderstood Goth daughter, Heidi, Kate is just as frustrated with the family that she created as the family she came from.
Everyone in the wedding party is connected in one way or another. Many have grown up together, which makes it hard to break ties without breaking ties with everyone you know. They act as one big dysfunctional family. Each has their own faults and issues that the others shake their heads at but ultimately let them be themselves.
There is definitely a sibling rivalry between Kate and her sister and even her cousin. She also has trouble being around her matchmaking mother. Worst of all, though, is her attitude toward her daughter. Despite her dark passions, Heidi seems like a good kid. Yet, her typical teenage behavior leads to her mother to call her names and even admit to not wanting her in the first place. The source of their friction is vague, and it seems to soften out of nowhere by the book’s end.
The one gem in the group is Andrew. He’s Kate’s wedding partner and childhood acquaintance who Kate strings along while online dating a bunch of gross losers in the process. He’s the guy that we’ve all dismissed for being not good enough without realizing that he’s the best in the bunch. It’s the selfless characters who keep Kate together, like her saintly next door neighbor and even Heather who plays the anti-bridezilla and whose wedding takes a back seat to everyone else’s shenanigans.
My recommendation
Making March is a great book to gift to the 40+ female readers in your life. The conflicts are trivial but relatable. And even though the protagonist is unlikable, she is relatable, and her story is a breezy read that’s not meant to be taken too seriously. At under 200 pages, it’s a quick read with an easy-to-swallow plot that’s about everyday people with their brand of crazy problems, just as we all have.
Also, check out my author interview with Hayley Walsh here!
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It’s cool that the story is told through journaling. We read a book told through texts. We like when a story is told in a unique way.