Something Blue
A Novel
-
- $16.99
Publisher Description
College friends Lucy and Katherine reunite as adults—and build a new friendship as changed women
Katherine shows up at Lucy’s Manhattan doorstep having run away from the marriage altar. Lucy isn’t thrilled to see her former sorority sister—her own life as a children’s book illustrator is complicated enough, especially as she may be falling out of love with her boyfriend. Along with Lucy’s oddball best friend, Julia, the women tackle the complicated challenge of being young, lost, and in search of life in New York City.
Something Blue is a heartfelt but never sentimental modern classic, capturing three women on the verge of the future, still figuring out the past, and trying to solve the present all at once. A novel that addresses friendship, ambition, and love head on, Something Blue and its three heroines head in surprising directions in their search for meaning.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hood's ( Somewhere Off the Coast of Maine ) breezy and absorbing fourth novel takes on a perennially popular subject, the friendships of moderately struggling young women in New York City. Lucy's career as an illustrator of children's books is on the verge of coming together; she's only unhappy that her boyfriend, a dancer just about ready to throw in the towel, is not equally successful. By contrast, Lucy's inveterately restless chum Julia (who moves from sublet to sublet, pretends to hail from Milan--not Brooklyn--and sleeps only with oddballs and foreigners) falls unexpectedly in love with one man and one apartment. And Lucy's old roommate Katherine, who has left her intended at the altar in Connecticut but can't seem to shed her prim, cookie-baking persona, arrives in the city as Lucy's somewhat unwelcome houseguest, trailing her unhappy past as a sorority girl. Over the course of a year, the three have affairs and endure breakups, agonize about the direction of their lives, and both doubt and reaffirm their sometimes difficult three-way camaraderie. Anchored in the contemporary by references to brand names, restaurants and TV shows, Something Blue offers a faithful and enjoyable group portrait that is at the same time facile, as Hood ties up all loose ends in the effort to launch her heroines with conventional brio.
