“Charlotte Silver wields stiletto wit. . . . [A] delightfully wicked social comedy.”
–Daily News
“Clever and ultimately wise. . . There’s nothing easy about these encounters—there’s a lot of analyzing and dissecting and misery and joy. . . . a bittersweet ode not to New York City per se but to the long, grueling journey from hopeful transplant to seasoned, hardened New Yorker—[Joan] Didion’s ‘Goodbye to All That’ (which these girls have surely read) for the ones who stay.”
—Slate
“An archly mannered coming-of-age novel.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“[Silver] introduces us to an endless parade of similar characters, amusing and infuriating in equal measure, as Cassandra and Sylvie take Manhattan…[and] spins off some terrific turns of phrase.”
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The Boston Globe“Both devastating and delightful…What John Updike did for the minutiae of men’s lives–brand names, domesticity and office trivia–Silver does for the Bennington graduates she follows.”
—Shelf Awareness“[This book] will make you think about how friendship can sometimes feel a lot like romantic love . . . It will also make you laugh, cringe and possibly cry as you remember the sins and redemptions of your own misspent youth.”
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The Globe and Mail (Toronto)
“This is such a delightful, affectionate satire of a best friendship gone awry. Charlotte Silver has a sharp eye for the deeply goofy consumption patterns of the young bourgeois bohemian (yes to artisanal lemonade; no to Trader Joe’s frozen hors d’oeuvres), and for the ill-advised love affairs they pursue. This book is honest, caustic and a lot of fun.”
—Jessica Grose, author of
Sad Desk Salad “Charlotte Silver frames the plight of 20-somethings trying to survive in New York with such a witty, poetic eye, petty arguments frequently take a surprisingly profound turn in this juicy novel.”
—Suzanne Rindell, author of
The Other Typist“In this wickedly comic, deliciously mischievous and purely pleasurable novel, Charlotte Silver has found the perfect distance and tone, enabling her to mock youth’s presumptions, vanities and self-delusions while maintaining overall fondness for her characters. The contemporaneous details are spot-on, the aphoristic wit shrewd and universal. These Bennington girls’ follies are recognizably our own.”
—Phillip Lopate, author of
Portrait Inside My Head and
Getting Personal“Devastatingly witty. . . . Charlotte Silver gets the secret language of female friendship just right, and the heartbreak of broken engagements and love gone bad, while she skewers so many cultural shrines: the farmer’s markets of artisanal Brooklyn, dates at the Harvard Club, older men and the young women who sleep with them. I kept thinking that Muriel Spark would love this book, and Dorothy Parker, too.”
—Elizabeth Benedict, editor of
What My Mother Gave Me: Thirty-one Women on the Gifts That Mattered Most“Caustically witty.”
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Kirkus Reviews“Silver excels at characterization and deftly blends tragedy and comedy.”
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Publishers Weekly
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