Every five years

The Red Book - Deborah Copaken Kogan (Hyperion, 2012)

This is one of those books that I sort of can't get enough of (and clearly I'm not alone): a certain of friends who went to an elite college or university, and how their lives are turning out X years down the road. But I am probably close to burning out on them, so I picked up this book with some amount of skepticism.

And then it blew my expectations out of the water. (Yay!)

The Red Book is Harvard's version of the Class Books that come out every five years around reunion time. And if you've ever had to do one, you know how hard it is to sum up your life and present it in its best light when you know your page will be surrounded my those of your classmates who won Olympic medals and founded start-ups and joined Doctors Without Borders, etc. .... while at the same time maintaining a cool and self-effacing humility about the whole thing. The Class Book is just a bunch of #humblebrag on steroids.

And that's sort of what this novel is about, or at least the framing device. Addison, Mia, Clover, and Jane are in town for their 20th reunion. And we start with their red book pages and then learn the truth that hides behind those pages. And we see other alumni pages too, as their lives intersect with the four characters. Our omniscient narrator also gets into the minds of an ex-boyfriend, a couple teenage children, one character's husband (who I found almost absurdly likable), and possibly more. It also teases the future, and it is sometimes reassuring to have a narrator say that "years later" a character will look back on a moment, since the "now" of the book is 2009, and the book came out in 2012. Even right now, we're just heading into the characters' 25th reunion.

Maybe it's just that the novel was so readable. And while the characters weren't always likable, they were mostly sympathetic, and that felt real to me. And even the melodrama of the plot (and boy is there plenty of it) seemed reasonable in the context of the storytelling. So thank you, Deborah Copaken Kogan, for a very pleasant surprise.