SOMETHING BLUE

Airhead antagonist gets her own novel in Giffin’s follow-up to Something Borrowed (2004).

Previously, Rachel took center stage, but the point of view shifts here to Darcy, who catches her fiancé, Dexter, hiding in the closet of Rachel’s Manhattan studio. Dex has just dumped Darcy mere days before their wedding, and Darcy expected sympathy, not betrayal, from maid-of-honor Rachel (see Carrington, above). Darcy and Rachel have been symbiotic friends since grade school, even moving together from Indiana to New York, Rachel to attend NYU Law and then work for a blue chip firm, Darcy to work in P.R. In the gal-pals’ lifelong competition, Darcy, the prettier and less ethical, has always trounced the allegedly smarter Rachel. (Rachel even turned 30 first.) Darcy had strayed from her own engagement, going off with Dex’s groomsman Marcus, by whom, she learns, she’s pregnant. Darcy and Marcus attempt a relationship—with disastrous results. Her superficial P.R. colleague Claire deserts her as glitz-spoiling single motherhood looms, and Darcy ends up in London, bunking with another grade-school chum, Ethan, now a novelist and architectural writer. Rachel’s previous visit with Ethan is grist for more Borrowed backstory: Ethan confesses to Darcy that Rachel and Dex were an item long before the closet confrontation. Ethan, impatient with Darcy’s vanity and indifference to prenatal care, scolds her, whereupon she sets out to reform her shallow goals. But things still come too easily to her, and consequently she experiences little meaningful struggle or other interesting conflict. Almost immediately upon arrival in London, she meets all new girlfriends and attracts a caring, rich and handsome doctor. Ethan warms to her when she reveals she’s carrying twins, and the two rapidly—too rapidly—learn the real meaning of love and friendship. Unfortunately, Darcy doesn’t succeed either in shedding her stereotype as shopaholic sybarite or in sustaining a novel of her own.

Reads, overall, like a rehash—however amusing—of Borrowed. Giffin’s next had better be Something New.