SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT

A young woman’s retrospective on a year that changed everything.

It's six hours after Callie Holt’s wedding, and her marriage is already over. While lounging in her pizza-stained wedding dress in the honeymoon suite’s bathtub (which she compares to a casket), Callie scrolls through photos on her phone and lands on one she took with her best friend, Virginia Murphy, on the day they moved in together. Callie thinks the day of the picture “marked the rising…of the strangest year of my life—the bright start of an arc that could only end in darkness.” From there, Forrey transports us back 13 months so we can witness the disaster unfold. Callie has just moved into an apartment on New York’s Upper East Side owned by Virginia’s parents, Mimi and Walter. They have known Callie since she was a child and love her like she was one of their own. Except Callie is not one of them, a fact that she's constantly reminded of because of their money and her lack thereof. When Callie has a meet-cute with handsome Whit Harris on the subway, it seems like her life may be finally falling into place—except that she can’t stop thinking about Virginia’s cousin Ollie, whom she secretly dated in college and whose carelessness with her feelings leaves her constantly trying to prove that she's worthy of his love. Combine this with an eating disorder, friendship jealousy, and trauma from losing her father when she was a teenager, and Callie’s growing relationship with Whit starts to take a back seat. The novel centers mostly on the year leading up to the wedding but includes some flashbacks, particularly to Callie’s college days, and flash-forwards to the wedding. The novel is overcrowded, and the subplot of Callie’s trying to finish her late father’s novel in progress feels pretty muddied. Despite the book’s flaws, Forrey’s gift for making the everyday feel compelling shines throughout.

An absorbing, if sometimes unconvincing, novel about the trials of navigating adulthood.