Every now and then, I like to pick up a book with zero context other than the title and the cover to know what it’s about. ‘Surprise me,’ I say to the book. There are so few genuine surprises in stories today because anything genuinely surprising gets spoiled by social media, marketing, or Goodreads. RACHEL WEISS’S GROUP CHAT felt like a good book to try this with since the synopsis on the back is pretty generic. It basically says Rachel’s turning 30, in a dead end job, and has a great group of friends. The cartoon picture on the front features a woman and a man (no group of friends), both lounging and texting. I assumed Rachel ended up in a group chat with a hot guy, which sounded like fun.
But this book ended up feeling disconnected from that generic description, title, and cover as it’s fairly different from all of those things. RACHEL WEISS’S GROUP CHAT is a PRIDE AND PREJUDICE update for 2025–the dead giveaway was the number of sisters (4 here, because 5 seems like a LOT by today’s standards) and the name of Rachel’s oldest sister, Jane. Jane’s not the most popular name in 2025 and it immediately clued me in to the source material. Great, I thought–I love a modern day Liz Bennett! But just as quickly, I also realized that Rachel Weiss was no Liz–she was much more clearly in the Bridget Jones version of Liz than the Liz version of Liz. And while that cover promised a social media romance, the group chat only involves Rachel’s girlfriends and her Darcy only kinda sorta uses Instagram sometimes.
The story of RACHEL WEISS’S GROUP CHAT revolves around Rachel and follows her over the course of the year she turns 30 (as billed). She works as a support technician at a big tech company, a job that pays the bills but isn’t a passion of hers. She’s the middle daughter in her family with her older sister Jane about to get engaged and her younger, infantile twin sisters still in high school. Rachel’s mom is adamant that she finds a great guy and is thrilled when Christopher Butkus, a tech company CEO, buys his parents a mansion across the street. Rachel is turned off by Christopher’s job and assumes he’s just a capitalist with no feelings toward human welfare. Meanwhile, Rachel keeps her three friends up to date on their group chat as all four deal with dating and growing into adulthood.
The arc for Rachel here is that she starts off in a place of overconfidence in many aspects of her life that prevents her from seeing the reality and nuance of things. She doesn’t care that she’s in a dead end job because her views about capitalism supersede her desire to work hard at a passion. She isn’t obsessed with marriage like her mother because she sees herself as a huge gift to any guy she dates and doesn’t care if they’re in it for the long haul or not. Besides, she just signed up for JDate and is sure her presence on the app will be a gift to someone there. When she does start dating a guy, her obliviousness to the way he treats her balances on the edge of desperate. She thinks she has the best friend group in the world and isn’t afraid to share all of her opinions about their lives with them. As a result, Rachel can be hugely unaware of herself and the potential consequences of her actions. She’s a definite departure from Bridget Jones who is fanciful and fumbling but tends to be defined by her own insecurities.
While I did think Rachel was funny and there is humorous writing throughout, Rachel’s own obliviousness is taken so far that, as a reader, I started questioning whether the author was actually in on the character’s behavior or if she too had a lack of awareness of some of the things that felt like they would have huge consequences for Rachel but then didn’t. For example, there is a scene when Rachel is invited to represent her company at an environmental gala her company is hosting. She gets lost in her own annoyance that her company isn’t authentically committed to the environment, so she stands up and makes a speech in front of the company’s CEO and all the high power attendees. She declares that if the company really truly cared about the environment they would have served plant based food that is sustainable. The crowd immediately jumps on her side and gives her a huge round of applause. She’s approached by another female CEO who thanks her for her ingenuity, and she impresses Christopher Butkus with her zeal. I felt confused by this reaction as, clearly, a low level employee that embarrasses the CEO of her company in front of a room full of colleagues would immediately be on the chopping block. But Rachel seems totally unaware of that consequence, and the author never mentions it either. Even further, Rachel herself is nowhere near a vegan as she says she can’t give up cheese. So it’s not even a position she necessarily supports!
To me, there is a kind of lunacy to this. There is some charm to it, but it also feels so disconnected to reality. There are tons more examples of this in the book, and I think you have to see it as charming if you are ever to buy into the romance here. Because, from afar, Christopher Butkus finds all of this VERY charming. So charming that he’s willing to make grand and silent gestures to improve himself in the eyes of Rachel. Rachel who, by the way, doesn’t know anything about the kind of company Christopher is the CEO of when she tears him down at that first dinner. She assumes a lot about him, and then holds him to those standards throughout the story. The romance here just didn’t work for me as I didn’t feel Rachel had any right to call him out without knowing anything about him in the first place.
The book is called RACHEL WEISS’S GROUP CHAT, so certainly her friends are an element of the story here too. I enjoyed her friend group as they did seem to care about each other and about Rachel. There are moments, though, where her friends’ behaviors feel like they lack consequences too, including one friend who steps outside her marriage. She decides not to tell her husband as it has made her recommit to him, and Rachel and friends think nothing of this decision. They sort of behave as if her husband deserves this for not initiating enough sex with their friend. There’s no nuance to this, and similarly no consequence.
I think the reader’s ability to view Rachel’s behavior as charming rather oblivious is sort of the lynchpin here in whether romance readers will enjoy this one or not. For me, there’s some appeal in the sheer insanity of it, but I would have enjoyed this more if it had been more grounded and relatable. Still, I’d rather a party be over-the-top than a snooze, and Rachel Weiss definitely knows how to keep a party, and a group chat, interesting.
3 out of 5 stars
Synopsis (from Amazon):
The year is already off to a bad start. It’s not enough that Rachel Weiss is stuck in a job she despises and has an unfortunate attraction to men who disappoint her. It’s the Year of Turning Thirty . . . and now her mother won’t stop trying to set up Rachel with the millionaire buying the house next door.
Luckily Rachel has amazing friends and their juicy group chat to keep her going. But amid work-mandated therapy, her thirteen gray hairs, and biking in the buff, she can’t help wondering why she isn’t moving forward like everyone else.
As Rachel’s life—and circle of friends—begins to fall apart, she confides in the last person she expects. The uptight, irritating—yet surprisingly funny and thoughtful—tech bro next door may be the one person who sees Rachel for the woman she wants to be. After random DMs turn into confessing letters, she begins to realize perhaps it was she who had him wrong all along.
