Everybody Rise by Stephanie Clifford

Genre: Nonfiction 

Publisher: St. Martin's Press

Pages: 371

Rating: ★★★★



Synopsis

It's 2006 in the Manhattan of the young and glamorous. Money and class are colliding in a city that is about to go over a financial precipice and take much of the country with it. At 26, bright, funny and socially anxious Evelyn Beegan is determined to carve her own path in life and free herself from the influence of her social-climbing mother, who propelled her through prep school and onto the Upper East Side. Evelyn has long felt like an outsider to her privileged peers, but when she gets a job at a social network aimed at the elite, she's forced to embrace them.

Recruiting new members for the site, Evelyn steps into a promised land of Adirondack camps, Newport cottages and Southampton clubs thick with socialites and Wall Streeters. Despite herself, Evelyn finds the lure of belonging intoxicating, and starts trying to pass as old money herself. When her father, a crusading class-action lawyer, is indicted for bribery, Evelyn must contend with her own family's downfall as she keeps up appearances in her new life, grasping with increasing desperation as the ground underneath her begins to give way.

Bracing, hilarious and often poignant, Stephanie Clifford's debut offers a thoroughly modern take on classic American themes - money, ambition, family, friendship - and on the universal longing to fit in. 

My Thoughts

If you've been following me on my instagram, then you'll know I have been reading Everybody Rise this last week. It is the debut novel from the award-winning New York Times reporter Stephanie Clifford. I was initially so excited to read this book when I saw College Prepster read it earlier this summer. Pretty much anything Carly reads I like and when I read the synopsis I knew that this was something I was going to be down for. 

Everybody Rise is set in 2006 just before the stock market crash in 2007. The novel takes a close look at a group of friends in America's upper class as they run around NYC and vacation in The Hamptons -- basically the dream. I mean the first scene takes place at a prep school lacrosse tailgate which was dripping in crystal stemware...like The Grove, but better.  It was like I was stepping into the instagram of KJP or Town & Country and I never wanted to leave. 

The book begins by introducing us to all the characters including Evelyn's social-climbing and ever critical mother, which gives us a quick and obvious glimpse at the pressures Evelyn has had to deal with growing up. Even coming from a well-to-do family in Maryland, Evelyn's family wealth isn't nearly that of the friends in her social circle. For growing up under the criticism of her mother, Evelyn seems to be pretty self-sufficient. She has a job working as a recruiter at the new social media start-up People Like Us. Evelyn must make the most of her prep school connections to bring New York's elite into the site. Evelyn's first target is Camilla Rutherford and by forging this friendship Evelyn finds herself at the tip top of New York society. 

From here, Everybody Rise takes readers through dinner parties at social clubs and boat races in the Adirondacks. Contrast these lavish lifestyle parties with Evelyn's crumbling family life in Maryland where her father faces indictment. As the book continues, you see Evelyn start living two lives and watch as she climbs the social ladder and leaves everything else behind her. She quickly becomes someone you love to someone you hate to someone you love again. 

I'm so excited that the producer of The Devil Wears Prada picked it up and will be turning it into a movie. I am also seriously hoping for a sequel. Clifford leaves the ending fairly open and it would be interesting to see how her friends in finance find themselves after the crash. 

My Favorite Line 

I always think the opening moments of a party are the hardest, before everyone has had enough to drink

Me Before You by Jojo Moyes

Genre: Nonfiction 

Publisher: Penguin Books 

Pages: 369

Rating: ★★★★



Synopsis

Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has never been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex-Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair-bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cannot live the way he is.

Will is acerbic, moody, bossy—but Lou refuses to treat him with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth living.

A love story for this generation, Me Before You brings to life two people who couldn’t have less in common—a heartbreakingly romantic novel that asks, What do you do when making the person you love happy also means breaking your own heart? 

My Thoughts

I am literally sitting here with the tears drying on my cheeks. I should probably let this ending marinate for a bit before launching into a review but I really just don't care and think I should just get all of the feelings down now.  

I had heard so much positive buzz about Me Before You that I honestly think I wasn't reading it for the longest time out of pure spite. More than that, everytime I read the synopsis I just didn't feel like it was going to be my thing. But once I found out they were making it a movie and heard about the cast (Kahleesi, Neville Longbottom and Finnick Odair...seriously, sign me up!) I was ready to give it a shot. 

This book was tricky and really snuck up on me. It started out pretty slow and I just couldn't see how it could be sooo good. I hated to think of darling love of my life Sam Claflin playing a quadriplegic. Pardon?! He is too beautiful to be immobile. And on top of that, how could Emilia Clarke play someone so meek as Louisa? But as the plot thickened and I stopped thinking of the characters in relation to the actors that would eventually be playing them, I was really able to get into the book. 

I won't lie though, it really took me up until half way through to get attached to this book. As I was reading it, I was thinking there was no way I would even look forward to the sequel or even care about how it all ended. That all changed with the last hundred pages. I flew through them in an hour and only stopped to wipe the tears from my eyes. 

It was that good. Granted, it doesn't take much to get a good cry out of me. Either way, this book really struck a chord, which in part is due to Moyes for creating such realistic characters who leave it all out on the table. With everything they both face, they grow and change and become new people by the end of the novel. The main focus isn't romance but more about life and the importance of making the right decisions. 

Now I am counting down to the sequel and it seems like the end of September can't come soon enough! 

My Favorite Line 

You only get one life. It's actually your duty to live it as fully as possible.

The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett

Genre: Nonfiction 

Publisher: Picador

Pages: 120 

Rating: ★★★★



Synopsis

When her corgis stray into a mobile library parked near Buckingham Palace, the Queen feels duty-bound to borrow a book. Discovering the joy of reading widely (from J. R. Ackerley, Jean Genet, and Ivy Compton-Burnett to the classics) and intelligently, she finds that her view of the world changes dramatically. Abetted in her newfound obsession by Norman, a young man from the royal kitchens, the Queen comes to question the prescribed order of the world and loses patience with the routines of her role as monarch. Her new passion for reading initially alarms the palace staff and soon leads to surprising and very funny consequences for the country at large. 

My Thoughts

This novella is witty and charming and seriously cute. Once The Queen discovers the joys of reading there is really nothing that can stop her. Everyone tries to intervene and get rid of her new habit but Her Majesty will not have it. It was so fun to see the Queen behaving the way everyone does when they are in the middle of a good book (i.e. ignoring responsibilities, making excuses, etc.). 

Overall, this novella offered some wonderful insight in the magic of reading and exploring new things. There isn't much else to say about this because it really is so short but this was clever and smart and I highly recommend!

My Favorite Line 

Yes that is exactly what it is. A book is a device to ignite the imagination. 

How To Be a Heroine by Samantha Ellis

Genre: Nonfiction 

Publisher: Chatto & Windus

Pages: 272

Rating: ★★★



Synopsis

While debating literature’s greatest heroines with her best friend, thirtysomething playwright Samantha Ellis has a revelation—her whole life, she's been trying to be Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights when she should have been trying to be Jane Eyre.

With this discovery, she embarks on a retrospective look at the literary ladies—the characters and the writers—whom she has loved since childhood. From early obsessions with the March sisters to her later idolization of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines stack up today. And, just as she excavates the stories of her favorite characters, Ellis also shares a frank, often humorous account of her own life growing up in a tight-knit Iraqi Jewish community in London. Here a life-long reader explores how heroines shape all our lives. 

My Thoughts

This book was seriously cute. I have become more and more interested in reading memoirs lately so as soon as I heard about this book I added it to the top of my list. 

This memoir follows Ellis's life and the books she read and how they shaped her life. I really enjoyed reading a good majority of it. I especially liked reading about what she though of the books that I have read and love. Her insights were spot on and it was interesting to see how her opinion about the characters changed after rereading the books. 

To me, the book was even better when I was reading about the books I haven't read. Ellis gives a synopsis with every book so you aren't left completely confused when she starts analyzing them. I now have a list of books that I never read but seriously need to read as a result of this Ellis's memoir.  

There wasn't too much literary criticism, mostly personal reflection. I would definitely recommend this to any book lover, but also completely understand that this definitely isn't for everyone. 

My Favorite Line

Reading might spoil my eyes, as my grandmother warned me it would, but Mr. Darcy showed it wouldn't stop me finding a husband. A gorgeous, intelligent husband, in fact, because real men liked bookish girls. It said so in Pride and Prejudice. 

Maybe in Another Life by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: Washington Square Press 

Pages: 352

Rating: ★★★★



Synopsis

At the age of twenty-nine, Hannah Martin still has no idea what she wants to do with her life. She has lived in six different cities and held countless meaningless jobs since graduating college. On the heels of leaving yet another city, Hannah moves back to her hometown of Los Angeles and takes up residence in her best friend Gabby’s guestroom. Shortly after getting back to town, Hannah goes out to a bar one night with Gabby and meets up with her high school boyfriend, Ethan.

Just after midnight, Gabby asks Hannah if she’s ready to go. A moment later, Ethan offers to give her a ride later if she wants to stay. Hannah hesitates. What happens if she leaves with Gabby? What happens if she leaves with Ethan?

In concurrent storylines, Hannah lives out the effects of each decision. Quickly, these parallel universes develop into radically different stories with large-scale consequences for Hannah, as well as the people around her. As the two alternate realities run their course, Maybe in Another Liferaises questions about fate and true love: Is anything meant to be? How much in our life is determined by chance? And perhaps, most compellingly: Is there such a thing as a soul mate?

Hannah believes there is. And, in both worlds, she believes she’s found him.

My Thoughts

I had some hesitations about reading this book. 

The first one being that I thought I was going to prefer one version of events over the other and end up skipping through half the book. But I was pleasantly surprised to find that I really loved both series of events! The story unfolded so well. After a few chapters, the book begins it's split narrative. It only goes one chapter in each of the parallel realities so it really keeps you engaged  in the stories and constantly wanting more. 

Another thing I thought I knew about this book I was that it was going to be a typical, stale chick-lit/rom-com and therefore not have any sort of lasting impression. But again, I was wrong. This was thought-provoking and fresh and I really, really loved every part of this story! Everything about this book was unconventional but that just added to the unique perspective on finding your way through life. 

I was so glad that this book proved me wrong. It was original and captivating and really snuck up on me and I enjoyed every second! 

My Favorite Line

Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices. I'm starting to think that when we don't own them, we don't own ourselves 

The Knockoff by Lucy Sykes and Jo Piazza

Genre: Fiction 

Publisher: Doubleday

Pages: 352

Rating: ★★★ 




Synopsis

An outrageously stylish, wickedly funny novel of fashion in the digital age, The Knockoff is the story of Imogen Tate, editor in chief of Glossy magazine, who finds her twentysomething former assistant Eve Morton plotting to knock Imogen off her pedestal, take over her job, and reduce the magazine, famous for its lavish 768-page September issue, into an app.

When Imogen returns to work at Glossy after six months away, she can barely recognize her own magazine. Eve, fresh out of Harvard Business School, has fired “the gray hairs,” put the managing editor in a supply closet, stopped using the landlines, and hired a bevy of manicured and questionably attired underlings who text and tweet their way through meetings. Imogen, darling of the fashion world, may have Alexander Wang and Diane von Furstenberg on speed dial, but she can’t tell Facebook from Foursquare and once got her iPhone stuck in Japanese for two days. Under Eve’s reign, Glossy is rapidly becoming a digital sweatshop—hackathons rage all night, girls who sleep get fired, and “fun” means mandatory, company-wide coordinated dances to Beyoncé. Wildly out of her depth, Imogen faces a choice—pack up her Smythson notebooks and quit, or channel her inner geek and take on Eve to save both the magazine and her career. A glittering, uproarious, sharply drawn story filled with thinly veiled fashion personalities, The Knockoff is an insider’s look at the ever-changing world of fashion and a fabulous romp for our Internet-addicted age. 

My Thoughts 

So this book started off a little bit slow and took me a while to get into it, but once I did I thoroughly enjoyed it! 

The authors take the time in the beginning of the book to really emphasize the lack of technology that Imogen is accustomed to which became a little over the top and a little unbelievable. Imogen is only in her early forty's and I found it very hard to believe that she couldn't even check her email. Regardless, this ensured the tech gap to between Eve and Imogen to be large enough for the story to work. 

What I really was interested in was the dynamic between the Millennial workers and the Generation X's. It was easy to relate to the younger characters in the book and also feel so disgusted at the behavior that my generation is known for. 

Take Devil Wears Prada and add a tech spin to it and you would pretty easily have The Knockoff.

My Favorite Line

Imogen sometimes wondered if people weren't letting social media dictate their entire lives. Did they choose to go to one party over another because it would look better on Instagram? 

The Royal We by Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan

Genre: Fiction

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing 

Pages: 454

Rating: ★★★★



Synopsis

American Rebecca Porter was never one for fairy tales. Her twin sister, Lacey, has always been the romantic who fantasized about glamour and royalty, fame and fortune. Yet it's Bex who seeks adventure at Oxford and finds herself living down the hall from Prince Nicholas, Great Britain's future king. And when Bex can't resist falling for Nick, the person behind the prince, it propels her into a world she did not expect to inhabit, under a spotlight she is not prepared to face.

Dating Nick immerses Bex in ritzy society, dazzling ski trips, and dinners at Kensington Palace with him and his charming, troublesome brother, Freddie. But the relationship also comes with unimaginable baggage: hysterical tabloids, Nick's sparkling and far more suitable ex-girlfriends, and a royal family whose private life is much thornier and more tragic than anyone on the outside knows. The pressures are almost too much to bear, as Bex struggles to reconcile the man she loves with the monarch he's fated to become.

Which is how she gets into trouble.

Now, on the eve of the wedding of the century, Bex is faced with whether everything she's sacrificed for love-her career, her home, her family, maybe even herself-will have been for nothing.

My Thoughts

I have tried to read this book so many times. The minute I heard about it I knew that I had to read it so the day that it went on sale I went to Square Books in my small college town of Oxford, Mississippi only to find out that they did not have it. So I decided to wait until after finals to read it. But for some reason I chose to read the awful Vacationers instead. Then I went on to finish Outlander and when I could finally fit it in, none of the Barnes & Noble's near me had it. So when I was finally able to lay hands on the hard cover of this book I was so excited to dive in. 

This book is best described as Kate Middleton fan-fiction -- hence why I absolutely had to read it. All the characters are easy to compare to the real life members of the Kate and Will story. It was easy to take what I was reading and apply it to their story, but at the same time the characters were also able to stand alone in their own way. Not only was I in love with Nick and Bex, I was genuinely interested in the secondary characters as well. Cocks and Morgan were careful to be sure that they were just as developed and interesting as the main characters.  I fell in love with all them so easily which really made it hard to put down when it was all over. 

The story is told from Bex's perspective and starts the night before the big royal wedding. This teases some big scandal that you eventually get to towards the end of the book. We then rewind back to Bex's first day at Oxford and from that point her story continues chronologically. 

This book is everything that I wanted. A funny love story with well-rounded characters, a little bit of wish-fulfillment but also emotional journeys that feel real. Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan really did a great job at creating a look at what the royal family looks like from the inside -- and it's not as glamorous as we might think.

My Favorite Line

I hung up the phone and tapped it lightly against my chin, then wrapped myself tighter in my giant woolen cardigan and poured another glass of boxed wine — the official drink of emotionally confused women on a budget.