TAKE WHAT YOU CAN

Two American women who meet in France when they’re 20 become lifelong friends.

Milly and Val are best friends—more like sisters, really. From the time Milly, who pretty much always gets what she wants, chooses Val—agreeable, academically driven, and the only other Black student on their study-abroad program—to travel with her when the program ends, the two have remained deeply connected, even during their relationship’s inevitable times of trouble. That connection is facilitated by Helene, a well-to-do American living in France who becomes a mother figure to both of them. Both Milly and Val are lacking for actual mothers: Milly because her devoted mother has died, and Val because her abusive mother has cruelly pushed her away. Coster’s book toggles back and forth in time and, 14 years after they met, Milly and Val are accomplished in their careers: Milly is a successful lifestyle influencer in New York and Val a North Carolina journalist with a book deal. Each is married—Milly to a nurturing, handsome, and wealthy restaurateur with a family pedigree, Val to a fresh-out-of-grad school anthropology lecturer who is clever and charming but also unreliable and self-indulgent. Both women, too, are pregnant. When Milly asks Val to come back to New York, where they had been roommates for several years, so they can raise their daughters side by side, Val eagerly agrees to move her growing family to Brooklyn. But will the women’s friendship—and the women themselves—be able to grow and evolve with their shifting circumstances, expectations, and geographic proximity? In this delicious page-turner, set in such alluring locales as Paris, Provence, and Park Slope, Coster brings us two fascinating, fallible, and sometimes frustrating characters who are learning to balance freedom and responsibility—to themselves and their families, both biological and chosen. Writing with sensitivity, candor, and insight, Coster compellingly tracks the ups and downs of longstanding friendship, motherhood and daughterhood, marriage, and career. We can’t help but root for these smart, accomplished women as they seek to square the demands of those around them with their own needs, desires, and dreams.

An intimate, immersive paean to the redemptive power of found families and the pleasure of choosing whom and how to love.