Social Engagement
A Novel
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3.5 • 19 Ratings
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"If you’re looking for a page-turner with some bite, this one’s for you." —theSkimm
"Millennial wedding culture gets a much-needed skewering in this alternately light and biting novel." — Vogue
A razor-sharp and darkly humorous debut novel exploring millennial wedding culture, class, and relationships, all filtered through the ever-present lens of social media.
In an opulent honeymoon suite in Watch Hill, Rhode Island’s most desirable wedding venue, 29-year-old Callie Holt is spending her wedding night lying in a bathtub shoveling down a pizza; her expensive white dress now splattered with sauce and her groom passed out in the next room. With her seven-hour-old marriage already imploded, Callie turns to the place of record – her phone – sifting through the photographic evidence of the past year to pinpoint where it all went wrong.
Could it have started when Callie moved in with her best friend, Virginia Murphy, in the swanky Upper East Side pied-à-terre for which Virginia’s parents foot the bill? Or when Virginia’s irritatingly attractive cousin (and Callie’s secret ex) Ollie returned from pursuing his photography career abroad, throwing a wrench in Callie’s relationship with her kind (if a bit dim) finance bro boyfriend, Whit? Or was the true turning point when Callie stumbled upon a dark secret lurking in the Murphys’ well-heeled past, one with the potential to upend everything Callie knows about the people she considers her second family?
Over the course of one wedding-filled year, all these long-simmering secrets and resentments will come bubbling to the surface, leading to a reckoning that will strip Callie and everyone around her down to their most gruesomely real, filter-free selves. As Callie attends wedding after wedding, getting tagged in post after post, she begins to contemplate—and actualize through her own art—the gulf between the true selves of the people around her and the selves they present on their screens.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Forrey, coauthor of How to Skimm Your Life, makes her fiction debut with a smart and appealing chronicle of a woman reexamining her life on her wedding night. As a middle-class child spending summers at the beach in Rhode Island, Callie Holt befriends wealthy Virginia Murphy and her cousin Ollie. She obtains a scholarship to attend Brown University with Ollie and Virginia, where she strikes up a romantic relationship with Ollie that he urges her to keep secret. After college, Callie, whose late father, Walter, was an unpublished novelist, gives up on her dreams of a career as an artist to work in communications, while Ollie and Virginia have the means to focus on photography and painting, respectively. Several years later, Callie moves into a Murphy family pied-à-terre in New York City with Virginia, where she discovers Walter's unfinished novel in a chest of drawers. As she reads it, Callie comes to suspect that her father had an affair with Virginia's mother. Adding to the drama are Callie's lingering feelings for Ollie, and Ollie and Virginia's plagiarizing of Callie's artwork. The author wrings plenty of tension from Callie's complicated relationship with her benefactors, and portrays the book's multifaceted characters with honesty and tenderness, especially as events build toward a climactic wedding-night confrontation. Readers will enjoy this heartfelt story.
Customer Reviews
Road to nowhere
Not worth a penny.