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    Rich and Pretty: A Novel
    Rich and Pretty: A Novel
    Rich and Pretty: A Novel
    Audiobook10 hours

    Rich and Pretty: A Novel

    Written by Rumaan Alam

    Narrated by Julie McKay

    3/5

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    About this audiobook

    This irresistible debut, set in contemporary New York, provides a sharp, insightful look into how the relationship between two best friends changes when they are no longer coming of age but learning how to live adult lives.

    As close as sisters for twenty years, Sarah and Lauren have been together through high school and college, first jobs and first loves, the uncertainties of their twenties and the realities of their thirties.

    Sarah, the only child of a prominent intellectual and a socialite, works at a charity and is methodically planning her wedding. Lauren—beautiful, independent, and unpredictable—is single and working in publishing, deflecting her parents’ worries and questions about her life and future by trying not to think about it herself. Each woman envies—and is horrified by—particular aspects of the other’s life, topics of conversation they avoid with masterful linguistic pirouettes.

    Once, Sarah and Lauren were inseparable; for a long a time now, they’ve been apart. Can two women who rarely see one other, selectively share secrets, and lead different lives still call themselves best friends? Is it their abiding connection—or just force of habit—that keeps them together?

    With impeccable style, biting humor, and a keen sense of detail, Rumaan Alam deftly explores how the attachments we form in childhood shift as we adapt to our adult lives—and how the bonds of friendship endure, even when our paths diverge.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateJun 7, 2016
    ISBN9780062471857
    Author

    Rumaan Alam

    Rumaan Alam is the author of the novels Rich and Pretty, That Kind of Mother, and the instant New York Times bestseller Leave the World Behind. His writing has appeared in The New York Times, New York Magazine, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Bookforum, and the New Republic, where he is a contributing editor. He studied writing at Oberlin College and lives in New York with his family.

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    Reviews for Rich and Pretty

    3/5

    74 ratings10 reviews

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    • 3/5
      This novel feels almost a little to close to real life. It chronicles the challenges of two female friends as their lives begin to change as one marries and starts a family while the other struggles to establish a committed relationship. For all that these women are "rich and pretty", these themes feel normal and almost mundane. Okay for a novel, but I kept wanting more from this one.
    • 1/5
      Characters are flat. They don’t progress or grow throughout the narrative.
    • 5/5
      it's shocking to me that this book was written by a man. I find few books that speak to me as much as this one did. The author must be a very perceptive individual.

      It felt like it was written for me and this particular moment in my life. I'm marginally younger than the protagonists but very much in the same phase of life, where I am struggling with my life diverging from my best friends that I have known and loved for years. We used to be on the same page and now we are not.

      Our friendships are shifting and it can be a bittersweet experience, one I think that the author captured perfectly. It is somewhat painful to realize that things you thought you had in common you do not. That you don't share a heart and mind and vision of the future, like it may have once seemed. You can judge each other harshly for this. I'm searching now for that depth of love in these friendships to pull us through this time. And I believe it will like it ultimately does in this story.

      The characters were real and complex. The story had a slow but consistent pace and was not overly dramatic or melodramatic.
    • 1/5
      Couldn't go past page 30. Fragmented style did not entice me.
    • 4/5
      LOVED this book. Lauren and Sarah were delightfully flawed, Huck and Lulu were huge characters who didn't take over the story, Dan was ambivalently important, and Rumaan Alam created a world I readily dove in to and loved. The friendship between Lauren and Sarah was really well written and felt really real, like these characters were based on actual women with a complicated best friendship. The elements of setting, story, and character were brought together wonderfully and I could just keep reading and reading about this world. Big thumbs up!
    • 2/5
      The jacket of the book was so good. Disappointed with the stories and the characters. Borderline boring! I received a free copy of this book thru a giveaway.
    • 2/5
      Why? Why was this book written, and why did it enjoy critical acclaim? This reads like a writing exercise. Write in the voice of affluent white women, one who takes the Park Slope breeder path, the other a "career gal" who sleeps around and has no interest in children. As an exercise Alam does a decent job. I recognized many aspects of these women, real versions of whom I know many. He got some wrong too. Everything from childbirth on in Sarah's story is so inauthentic it made me laugh, he clearly got it from reading Liane Moriarty or someone similar. Lauren reads more like a Gay man than a thirtysomething straight woman. Like Samantha on Sex and the City. On the whole though he got more right than wrong, and the prose is well crafted. But there is no there here. There is no story of interest, no plot at all. (Women grow up, one gets married and has a baby, the other screws up relationships and excels at work, perhaps because of her fraught but entirely unexamined relationship with her hopelessly declasse parents, who are so ordinary they have flower shaped soaps in the powder room.) The characters are not nearly interesting enough to sustain the reader where there is no story. An utter waste of time, but not unpleasant.
    • 5/5
      Such a good book about friendship. Always interesting when a man writes well about women
    • 4/5
      The story of a pair of best friends as they navigate through their young adulthood. Although very close they have different perspectives on marriage, kids and to some extent men. Sarah is still very close to her family but Lauren is not. They met when they were eleven years old telling each other everything when they were young. Now older they have drifted apart due to their diverse interests and goals. I feel that this is a very realistic portrayal of upper crust women and is worthy of reading. Not a very complex plot but well done.
    • 3/5
      A book about women's friendship. A series of anecdotes, really. Sarah and Lauren meet at school when they are 11 and remain friends for over 25 years, sometimes close and sometimes drifting apart, but always knowing their friendship will never be really over, because they need each other. Not too much actually happens in the book, although there are events that move the two friends more firmly into full adulthood. A pleasant read.