With a thriving cooking business, full schedule of volunteer work, and a beautiful home in the Philadelphia suburbs, she should be content.īut her teenage daughter can be a handful, her husband can be distant, her work can feel trivial, and she has lots of acquaintances, but no real friends. When Drue begs and pleads and dangles the prospect of cute single guys, Daphne finds herself powerless as ever to resist her friend’s siren song.ĭaisy Shoemaker can’t sleep. Letting glamorous, seductive Drue back into her life is risky, but it comes with an invitation to spend a weekend in a waterfront Cape Cod mansion.

She’s built a life that she loves, including a growing career as a plus-size Instagram influencer. Meanwhile, Daphne’s no longer the same self-effacing sidekick she was back in high school. Daphne hasn’t spoken one word to Drue in all this time-she doesn’t even hate-follow her ex-best friend on social media-so when Drue asks if she will be her maid-of-honor at the society wedding of the summer, Daphne is rightfully speechless.ĭrue was always the one who had everything-except the ability to hold onto friends. Six years after the fight that ended their friendship, Daphne Berg is shocked when Drue Cavanaugh walks back into her life, looking as lovely and successful as ever, with a massive favor to ask. The line between reality and fantasy begins to blur in a clash between an aging critic who will do anything to hold on to what she has and a desperate author who will stop at nothing to get what she wants.

She makes it clear that she’ll do anything - absolutely anything - to get her book on Laurel’s radar.Īs author and critic play cat and mouse in Paris, ominous tokens appear, dark secrets are revealed, and Laurel finds herself haunted by her history and tormented by Tess’ book. But Tess is undeterred by Laurel’s scorn. She can’t stand Tess herself, a chirpy, chunky blond with a tote bag full of a seemingly inexhaustible supply of her book, The Comfort Diet. Laurel despises books like Tess’: easy reads with happy endings, where the fat girl finds true love or happiness through yoga. But when Laurel ends up taking a group of bibliophiles on a tour of literary Paris, she meets her worst nightmare: an eager debut author of commercial fiction named Tess Kravitz. She doesn’t want to lose her spot on top of the literary world - not any more than she wants to replace her decades-old cartoon head shot with a new photograph. For years - more than she wants to admit - she’s written acid-etched reviews, gleefully goring sacred cows, anointing Great American Novelists, keeping the mob of scribbling authors in their place while enjoying all the perks of her position. Laurel Spellman is the most respected and feared literary critic in America.

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