The Red Book
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3.5 • 4 Ratings
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
'Destined to be a classic . . . a sharply funny, clear-eyed examination, in the vein of Mary McCarthy's The Group, of the power and burden of privilege, the reality of being a modern woman and the lasting bonds of female friendship.'
Vanity Fair
Can a weekend change your life?
Clover, Addison, Mia and Jane were college roommates until their graduation in 1989. Now, twenty years later, their lives are in free fall. Clover, once a securities broker with Lehman Brothers, living the Manhattan dream, is out of a job, newly married and fretting about her chances of having a baby. Addison's marriage to a novelist with writers' block is as stale as her artistic 'career'. Mia's acting ambitions never got off the ground, and she now stays home with her four children, renovating and acquiring faster than her Hollywood director husband can pay the bills. Jane, once the Paris bureau chief for a newspaper, now the victim of budget cuts, has been blindsided by different sorts of loss.
The four friends have kept up with one another via the red book, a class report published every five years, in which alumni write brief updates about their lives. But there's the story we tell the world, and then there's the real story, as the classmates arriving at their twentieth reunion with their families, their histories, their dashed dreams and secret longings, will discover over the course of an epoch-ending, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
As readers of photojournalist and author Kogan's second novel learn, Harvard doesn't content itself with the alumni mags and e-mails and letters other colleges make do with: before big reunions, it sends out a bound crimson book containing alumni updates on their lives, a reunion cheat sheet that gives Kogan both her title and structural framework. That exasperated sigh you hear, from those of us who didn't go to Harvard, carries through the first pages, which feature the entries of Kogan's four main characters: WASPy Addison Cornwall Hunt, an artist and trust funder living in Williamsburg, Brooklyn; black, commune-raised Lehman Brothers managing director Clover Pace Love; Jewish ex-actress and stay-at-home mom Mia Mandelbaum Zane, splitting her time between L.A. and France; and Boston Globe journalist Jane Nguyen Streeter, born in Vietnam, raised in the American suburbs, and based in Paris. Their entries are obviously written to impress and to cover up; real life is what happens before and after, which, in this case, means these class of '89ers' 20-plus years of friendship and the three days that constitute their 20th reunion and the bulk of Kogan's book. What starts out feeling like a marketing-driven "women's" book the perfect read for a mani-pedi turns out to be a smart, funny, engrossing, and action-packed meditation on women's lives, growing up, having and not having it all, class and the expectations that come with having gone to Harvard, love lost and found, infidelity and sexuality, and finally, loss and lying, especially to yourself.
