Synopsis
Kate Hollis’s ex-boyfriend’s face plasters newsstands and TV, the Internet, and the multiplex. Jake Sharpe is one of the biggest recording stars on the planet, and every song he’s famous for is about Kate. For over a decade his soundtrack has chased her - from the gym to the supermarket, from the dentist’s office to the bars. Now thirty-year-old Kate gets the call that Jake has finally landed back in their Vermont hometown for an MTV special. The moment she has been waiting for has arrived.
On the eve of their prom, Jake Sharpe vanished, resurfacing when his song “Losing” - about his and Kate’s first sexual experience - shot to the top of the Billboard charts. And the hits kept coming, each more personal than the one before.
Now Kate gets her chance to confront Jake and reclaim her past. But after eleven years of enduring protracted and far-from-private heartbreak, everyone in Kate’s life has a stake in how this plays out. Kate must risk betraying the friends Jake abandoned, the bandmates whose songs he plundered, and her own parents, who fear this will dredge up a shared past more painful than any of them want to acknowledge. But after getting the call in the dead of night and jumping on a plane, can she turn back now?
Newsweek dubbed The Nanny Diaries “a national phenomenon” and the New Republic proclaimed, “Thank God for Citizen Girl.” Now McLaughlin and Kraus have written a poignant, humorous tale about modern celebrity obsession and coming of age during the divorce boom. With flawless depictions of the 1980s, a charismatic heroine, and their signature biting wit, the authors offer up another lively and hilarious tale of a smart young woman looking for satisfaction in the chaos of contemporary culture.
Publishers Weekly
The team behind The Nanny Diariesand Citizen Girlreturns with another breezy chick lit portrayal of a woman wronged and, eventually, empowered. When Kate Hollis's childhood chum Laura calls from their Vermont hometown and announces the arrival of Jake Sharpe, a mega rock star and Kate's high school sweetheart, Kate jumps on a plane from Charleston, S.C. (where she's a sustainable development consultant) and makes for idyllic Croton Falls. Through it's been 13 years, Kate still has a primal need to confront not only the boy who abandoned her before the senior prom, but the musical pirate who used her personal life as fodder for his most celebrated songs and cheated his high school bandmates out of deserved recognition and royalties. Chapters switch back and forth between the present and the pivotal middle and high school years where Kate (then Katie) and Jake did the first-love thing: readers get to see Jake's growing he's-just-not-that-into-you-ness and how (surprise!) their Zima-fueled love (it was the '90s) was idealized. While one spends much of the book wanting to shout at Kate to give it up, go back to Charleston and get on with it, McLaughlin and Kraus do get the nagging need for closure in even the shallowest relationships comically right. (June)
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