With rich people behaving scandalously on every page, this lemon is juicy and delicious.
Weisberger (The Singles Game, 2016, etc.) gives rich-lit fans a second spinoff of her best-known novel, The Devil Wears Prada, shifting her lens from long-suffering Andrea Sachs to Emily Charlton, the snippy fashionista who worked as top assistant to Runway magazine’s hellish editor, Miranda Priestly.
A decade after leaving Runway, Emily has successfully reinvented herself as a celebrity stylist and image consultant specializing in crisis management. But it’s her own career that’s in jeopardy when a hotshot rival starts luring away Emily’s Hollywood clients with millennial social media superpowers. Emily needs a big win or she may as well pack it up and head back to Runway. Thankfully, her childhood friend Miriam Kagan has just the gig for her. Miriam recently moved to tony Greenwich, Connecticut, where former supermodel and current senator’s wife Karolina Hartwell is hiding out after a brush with the law. Something about Karolina’s DUI arrest just doesn’t add up, though. Miriam dusts off her Harvard law degree and Emily kicks into high gear, discovering their friend Karolina has been set up by her husband, an ambitious politician with his eye on the White House. Now the three friends must take him down. Having a kick-ass girl posse is not only great fun, but essential for survival in this town filled with moms obsessed with SoulCycle, trophy kids, and plastic surgery—including having their vaginas “custom fit” for their husbands. In one scene, a designer-clad mom hosts a sex-toy party where the constant drumbeat is fear that husbands will abandon wives who aren’t smokin’ hot and sexually available at all times. (Every sex toy is discussed in terms of how much pleasure it will bring the men.) Emily, Miriam, and Karolina pose a refreshing contrast to the Greenwich moms who all seem to be swimming in the extremely shallow end of the pool.
With rich people behaving scandalously on every page, this lemon is juicy and delicious.Pub Date: June 5, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-4767-7844-0
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2018
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles...
Sisters in and out of love.
Meghann Dontess is a high-powered matrimonial lawyer in Seattle who prefers sex with strangers to emotional intimacy: a strategy bound to backfire sooner or later, warns her tough-talking shrink. It’s advice Meghann decides to ignore, along with the memories of her difficult childhood, neglectful mother, and younger sister. Though she managed to reunite Claire with Sam Cavenaugh (her father but not Meghann’s) when her mother abandoned both girls long ago, Meghann still feels guilty that her sister’s life doesn’t measure up, at least on her terms. Never married, Claire ekes out a living running a country campground with her dad and is raising her six-year-old daughter on her own. When she falls in love for the first time with an up-and-coming country musician, Meghann is appalled: Bobby Austin is a three-time loser at marriage—how on earth can Claire be so blind? Bobby’s blunt explanation doesn’t exactly satisfy the concerned big sister, who busies herself planning Claire’s dream wedding anyway. And, to relieve the stress, she beds various guys she picks up in bars, including Dr. Joe Wyatt, a neurosurgeon turned homeless drifter after the demise of his beloved wife Diane (whom he euthanized). When Claire’s awful headache turns out to be a kind of brain tumor known among neurologists as a “terminator,” Joe rallies. Turns out that Claire had befriended his wife on her deathbed, and now in turn he must try to save her. Is it too late? Will Meghann find true love at last?
Briskly written soap with down-to-earth types, mostly without the lachrymose contrivances of Hannah’s previous titles (Distant Shores, 2002, etc.). Kudos for skipping the snifflefest this time around.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-345-45073-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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