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.

Something old, something new

The Singles - Meredith Goldstein (Plume, 2012)

This novel dips into two of my favorite genres: the chick lit (naturally) and the college-friends-in-their-lives-after-college that has the potential to cross into literary fiction.

And it's set at a wedding (a commonplace venue for the latter type mentioned above) - a time of hubbub and ridiculousness that feels familiar smack in the midst of the holiday season.

It's Bee's wedding. Don't get too attached to Bee though, because although there are all sorts of interesting hints about her and her relationships to the people around her, we really don't get to meet her much. It's really about the group that at most other weddings would be tossed together at the "singles" table, but for some reason aren't here: three college friends (one of whom is a bridesmaid), an uncle, and the groom's mother's friend (or rather, her son).

Chapters skip from the perspective of one to the next. Over the course of the evening, each undergoes a crisis (or two or three) and as they bump into each other, you get hints of the ways they might yet come to be one another's saviors. Although there are plenty of red herrings thrown in. And in the end (spoiler? I guess?) each emerges from Bee's wedding ready to enter a new stage of life, perhaps even more so than Bee herself.

Maybe I've done it wrong, but I've never had quite this experience at a wedding. But then again, that's probably for the best.

Runaway Bride!

The Great Escape - Susan Elizabeth Phillips (William Morrow, 2012)

Instead of a fake marriage, we have a wedding that aborts just before takeoff. And if this sounds familiar, it may be in part because it's the other half of Phillips' last novel. There, the runaway bride's best friend finds herself stranded with the just-too-perfect groom. Here, we ditch Texas for the Great Lakes, where the bride ends up after a stint on the back of a motorcycle. (This, btw, is not the first time this scenario has played out in a Phillips' novel.)

Did we mention the bride is the daughter of the former president, and thus this non-wedding is a huge scandal?

Lucy didn't get to sow any wild oats during her teen years. So she's going to do that now. With a reluctant biker named Panda, and some hair dye, and fake tattoos, and whatever else it takes. The love story plays out more or less the way you'd expect. But the B and C plots are delightful. Lucy picks up some girlfriends along the way, and an orphaned boy, and there are some nice lessons learned about resilience, vulnerability, and the ways in which communities can provide for one another. Pretty charming.

(Why did I never set up an "absurd but adorable marriage plot" tag for my blog?)

How we learn to be ourselves

The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants - Ann Brashares (Delacorte Press, 2001)


The Second Summer of the Sisterhood - Ann Brashares (Delacorte Press, 2003)


Girls in Pants: The Third Summer of the Sisterhood - Ann Brashares (Delacorte Press, 2005)


Forever in Blue: The Fourth Summer of the Sisterhood - Ann Brashares (Delacorte Press, 2007)


Sisterhood Everlasting - Ann Brashares (Random House, 2011)


I've been moving! Which meant that I was very excited when a friend had a book swap and I was able to bring over all the books I had been saving up. It also meant that despite my best efforts, when I saw 3  of the Sisterhood novels, I picked them up. Years ago, a friend recommended them (or the movie?) and I had vaguely planned to read them. So in the midst of packing, I started reading the first one. Because really, what is better than YA as an escape from stress?

And then the second, and the third. And then I started looking online to see if there were more. All told, I think I read the five in about 4 weeks? Everyone already know the story, right? Four friends, and a pair of jeans that magically fits them all, and not just fits, but makes them look extra hot. The Pants become the way they "stay together" when summer takes them to different places. The Pants bear witness to their struggles to cope with change, and growing up, and love and loss. The first summer, the girls are a summer away from their 16th birthdays, by the third they are about to leave for college. The fourth finds them after their freshman years, and the last novel comes a decade later.

Reading them in the span of a month rather than over ten years, as they were written, it really jumps out at you how much the girls have to learn the same lessons over and over and over. How to be brave, how to be open to change and to forgive those who change around you, how to see past surfaces and accept the love that's offered, how to be vulnerable. And then to return to them, as young women about to turn 30, with years more of experience, the lessons are still there to be learned.

And that tore me up. It was an unexpected sucker punch. Maybe because it threw into such stark relief that fact that the lessons I have learned over the years need to be learned again and again and again. You don't just reach an epiphany and get to happily ever after. Or even to the next level, like some sort of video game. Or perhaps, to play with the video game analogy some more, you do, but you just repeat the same level again and again, in slightly different guise. You have to reach that epiphany, defeat the same boss, time and again. And that's a tough realization.

But no one reads the same book. We bring so much of ourselves - our past and especially our present - to what we read. I'm curious to know how others found Lena, Carmen, Tibby, and Bridget.

The freshman years of life

Commencement - J. Courtney Sullivan (Alfred A. Knopf, 2009)

I am a sucker for books about recent graduates of elite colleges and universities, and how they adjust - in their different ways - to life outside of that bubble. Often enough this means constructing different bubbles, but that is of plenty of interest to me as well.

In this version, four women become best friends at Smith College, Sullivan's alma mater. And the narrative is interspersed with recollections of their time as students. And then they go in separate directions, and their friendships are stretched and challenged. For better and for worse.

Early on, the novel won me over with one of my favorite ever descriptions of Irish dance: "which Celia now credited with her perfect posture and complete inability to dance like a normal person." Love it :)

There was also a lovely description of the ways in which powerful relationships develop in college: "Back then, they had expanses of time in which to memorize one another's routines and favorite songs and worst heartaches and greatest days. It felt something like being in love, but without the weight of having to choose just one heart to hold on to, and without the fear of ever losing it."

And maybe it's for that that I keep reading these novels...