Stephanie Clifford (1)Besprekingen

“Everybody Rise” is a cautionary tale about the perils of a young well-to-do girl who tries to fit into the world of the truly wealthy in the years just before the 2008 financial crash in Manhattan. Stephanie Clifford provides an unvarished look at class, money, and ambition among the privileged – and even though this is a novel, not an expose, she gets the details right.

The main character, Evelyn, whose family is worth a few million dollars (because her father earned it) is pushed by her mother, and then by her own desire, to get in with the “old money” crowd from her boarding school days. These are the people worth scores of millions, made generations ago (since few of them currently work) – rich in property, heritage, and trust funds. The U.S. may be a meritocracy for some, but the old money families in this book play by their own set of rules.

Other reviewers have likened this novel to “Bonfire of the Vanities” and “Prep”. I’d agree, and add in a dash of “The Great Gatsby.” (As a small aside, I love that the title comes from the Stephen Sondheim lyrics of “Ladies Who Lunch.”)

4.5 stars

Thank you to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for a galley of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This is "Bleak House" meets "Sweet Home Alabama". Personally, I am done with 20 somethings and their lack of planning and social climbing.

A solid book about social climbing and the inevitable fall...with a hopeful ending!

This book wasn’t for me. The beginning started off slow, and I could easily predict where this was going. It was hard to care about the many benefits, debutantes, and even Evelyn’s friends throughout the story, as they don’t appeal to me or my upbringing.

**I received this book for free from the publisher in exchange for an honest review**

3.75. I was hesitant to read Everybody Rise, sounded too I'm rich and fabulous, but I figured I would give it a go and I am so glad I did. It's like Donna Tartt's The Secret History and Gossip Girl blended together. Evelyn got a new job for a website that caters to rich people and is trying to find high society people to join, her mom has tried to push her into this scene, but Evelyn was against it. She now has to try to infiltrate this social group and the way to do that is to become like them. She spends money she doesn't have, makes up lies to give her a credible old money background, and does a lot of ass kissing to make it happen and become best friends with the most known NY socialite Camilla. Evelyn's character gets more unlikable as the novel goes on as she tries to fit in with these high society people. I think at times it can be hard to read from a unlikable character, because she is annoying, but it's well done where she isn't just unlikable, there's a desperation and the desperation grows throughout. I was glad to see where the plot went, some of points of the plot and characters were reaching and needed more depth, but still a very good read.

3.25 because the author used the correct "Canada goose" instead of the oh so wrong "Canadian goose", and Edith Wharton's [b:The House of Mirth|17728|The House of Mirth|Edith Wharton|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328729186s/17728.jpg|1652564] (one of my all time faves) was one of her inspirations. Otherwise this book was a fluffy social commentary trying really hard to be a serious social commentary and falling short. I also found it super ironic and more than a little hypocritical that the entire message of this book is about the evils of social climbing, but the author made sure to add in her bio that she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. Too bad she didn't graduate summa cum laude, maybe this book would have been just a little bit better if she had been able to pull off summa (just kidding). Totally middle of the road stuff here; reminds me of something I would have read in high school. My take away= meh.

I won a copy of the advanced audiobook from Armchair BEA. I listened to this for as long as I could stand it. Nothing to do with the book, I just couldn't get past the narrator's voice.

I received this audiobook as part of a First Reads Giveaway - thanks to Goodreads & the publisher.

And I wish I could say that this was a great treat - a free book is a free book, & this one is being billed as THE read of the summer. But the only reason I even finished it was because it was a giveaway, & I wanted to give it every chance to surprise me.

The story takes place right before the recession of 2008, in the rarified air of what would soon be known as the 1%. Evelyn Beegan has been raised to hobnob with these people, though she doesn't quite belong. Hailing from Bibville, MD, the child of a trial attorney who is known for large suits against heartless corporations, never having debuted herself, but on the periphery of it all from her prep school days, Evelyn has enough access to this world to think she wants more.

And therein lies the fatal flaw of this tale. First, this world doesn't sound appealing at all. Second, it doesn't sound at all real. These twenty-somethings are accepting the rules & standards of bygone days, & Evelyn wants to lock herself into the gilded cage with them.

But you have no idea why. Beyond marrying rich, there's nothing here for her but what she gets: debt. She ingratiates herself, uses people along the way, lies to everyone, and alienates the only two people who seem like they care about her.

And there is not even a moment of schadenfreude to enjoy. The rich stay rich; they're untouchable in the turbulent days just ahead. Everyone else is disposable and gets chewed up & spat out.

At the very end, Evelyn has what should be a moment of redemption. But we don't even remember the Evelyn who is supposedly "coming back." We've only seen the selfish, scheming shallow Evelyn that you can't find anything to attach to.

Stephanie Clifford's prose is tight, & the potential for a well-developed story is there. I don't know if it's the subject matter that is just so unbearable, but this was hard to get through, even as an audiobook. If you're on the fence about reading this, pass on it - there are better books to read.

A fall from grace after achieving rarified social status under false pretenses is a familiar story (think Edith Wharton). This one occurs, interestingly enough, immediately before the financial crash of 2008. Evelyn, relatively unskilled after completing prep school and college, takes a job at a website designed to exclude anyone but scions of the 1%. In pursuit of new clients, she latches on to a repulsive wealthy daughter and loses all sense. At the beginning of the novel, she is snarking fiercely about these selfsame shallow upper class Paris Hilton types, but then she succumbs, although she cannot hope to remain on the same bridle path due to lack of funds. Her comeuppance, when it arrives, is harsh, but there's still some humor to be wrung from it, which is why I enjoyed this novel so much.½

"A masterful tale of social climbing and entrenched class distinctions, as seen through the eyes of an outsider who desperately wants in. Tense, hilarious, and bursting with gorgeous language. Stephanie Clifford is a 21st-century Edith Wharton."--J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of The Engagements. 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"

When I picked up, “Everybody Rise” I simply wanted to hate it. I heard that all the Lily Pullitzer moms were reading it and to keep an eye on their doings, I thought I’d give it an open and honest read...

In “Everybody Rise” readers can expect a tale of class, status and power seeking among New York’s socialistas. Reliably narrated in third person point of view, Clifford takes us into the life of twenty-something Evelyn Beegan who in character is not particularly special and is wildly hungry to see and be seen among the social elite living in New York City.

At times the novel reads like a catalog for Robin Leach’s, “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous” only following a much younger social set. It’s jam packed with the names of American industrial families, galas and balls, restaurants and designers, wine and spirits, posh schools and retreats. It is so loaded that it becomes seductive for readers.

Evelyn cycles through employment, unemployment, relationships and networking. As she chases the “It Girl” Camilla Rutherford, Evelyn evolves a personal standard that is entirely unrealistic for someone as unmonied as she is. However she continues to fly too close to the sun only to be burned badly.

After suffering the symbiotic relationships among the social elite, readers can find respite in knowing that grand lessons are learned and bittersweet endings occur. For the Lily Pulitzer moms, here’s the take-away, relationships more than seasonal prints weigh heavier in importance which is something to think about while you are combing through the racks.½

A pleasant diversion to the Upper East Side and the weekend enclaves where swells convene to further insulate themselves from people who are interesting. An overriding theme? The in-crowd and the brands by which they identify themselves are repulsive. Clifford is a clever observer of that set and adequately conveys their tropes and habits and attitudes and prejudices. One misgiving: The boat-race incident defies crediblity.

Everybody Rise, Stephanie Clifford, author, Katherine Kellgren, narrator
Upwardly mobile 26 year old Evelyn Beegan is on the rise, but the rarified atmosphere of the Gatsbyesque world she wanted to join soon began to corrupt her moral sense of judgment. To hobnob with the rich and famous and accomplish her goal of rising in this esteemed circle’s judgment, hopefully catching a rich husband, also on the rise, she sacrificed her character and her sense of ethics, soon lying and spending far more money than she earned, pushing herself into deeper and deeper debt until it buried her. As reality set in, she deluded herself and lived in a state of denial to justify her behavior. Evelyn’s story is engaging, even as her actions and those of her frenemies become more and more repulsive.
Evelyn’s dad is a fairly well known lawyer who fought for the cause of those abused by big pharmaceutical companies that he and his clients believed had little regard for the dreadful side effects of some of their products. He was the darling of the Democrats. He won large awards for the victims of this perceived corporate corruption. One day, the bubble burst, and his methods attracted the scrutiny of the government. Evelyn’s life, already complicated, became more so.
She had been living beyond her means in the world of her dreams and had constructed a past and a personality that had no resemblance to reality. She was soon even assuming the identity of a former debutante, outsmarting those around her, trying to f it into that world with her charades. She became so embroiled in her own schemes that she convinced herself that she was trying to use her new found stature to rescue her family from its total collapse. She descended into a chaotic world of her own creation. After awhile, she fooled no one but herself.
She preferred the company of the snobs and class-conscious Brahmins of the world to that of ordinary hard working people and haughtily assumed the appropriate air of self-importance to suit the situation. She watched those in the know and carefully imitated them to ingratiate herself into their world, the world of the upper crust, and seemed unaware of the phony and artificial atmosphere. Evelyn was not truly up to the standards of the friends she wanted to run with, nor was she armed with the weapons to outclass them as she hoped. She soon learned to imitate and betray them, but it was doubtful that she could beat them at their own game.
There are humorous exchanges, especially between Evelyn and her mother. Evelyn seemed to be a contradiction in terms, though. On the one hand she was once a kind and good friend, and on the other she was a social climber, first and foremost. Will the real Evelyn ever stand up? Her relationship with her elitist mother dominated her behavior. I kept wondering if the people that she was dealing with could truly exist in the real world, but then I thought of places like Palm Beach and Rodeo Drive and said, yep, they exist, and those awful people who think they are better than the rest of us, also exist. It isn’t the wealth that makes the person offensive; it is the assumption of a higher status at the expense of others.
This book is a case study of a family that falls from grace, slowly but surely. Father, daughter and mother seem to live in an alternate reality. Each of them has severe character flaws. The author develops the characters very well but the story goes on and on with many extraneous dialogues and details as it attempts to explore the chasm between upper and middle class society. I got the point of the book fairly soon, but then it was belabored! Evelyn was rendered too naïve in many ways which contrasted almost too sharply with her obvious intelligence. Her mother seemed like a caricature of someone, not truly real.
Politics is at play here as the rich are demonized overtly and subtly. They are selfish, self absorbed, self-serving characters, even when they are working for a worthy cause. They preyed on the weak in order to control them and made unrealistic demands, more often than not, expecting complete obedience and deference to their station in life. They were not nice people. The middle class and worker bees appeared more genuine, thoughtful and real in their portrayal by the author!

I'd seat Everybody Rise in the emergent category of New Adult Fiction. It's a world of firsts: first job out of college, first grown-up residence, first marriageable relationship, first major life disappointment to face solo. Most of us make bumble-headed decisions at this time of our lives, and so a state-schooled Midwesterner like me can understand a prep-schooled east coaster like Evelyn.

This book is a tragedy of manners and that's likely why people are so fond of likening Stephanie Clifford to Edith Wharton. I can't embrace that comparison. Wharton belonged in the society pages. Clifford seems like an interloper. Based on her bio, my guess is she is "in group" enough to know what she's talking about. She's equally likely to be seen by the people who live the lifestyle she writes about as an outsider. That may make her even better suited to such commentary.

I would recommend Everybody Rise to a friend looking for a fun vacation read.

Full Review: http://rebelwithablog.blogspot.com/2015/06/evelyn-like-eev-lin-in-uk-or-evelyn.h...

This review is based on the ARC.

"I think our generation is obsessed with too much. We keep wanting to trade up, and if you think about Schopenhauer, the futility of striving and the ultimate emptiness of human desires…”…Evelyn had thought the weekend in the Hamptons, at Nick’s house that he owned and didn’t rent, with her friends who had gone to Sheffield and Enfield and St. Paul’s, Harvard and Dartmouth and Tufts and HBS, was enough. Yet she had taken the train when she was supposed to take the bus, and the bus wasn’t good enough so they were discussing a helicopter, and then the helicopter would be subordinate to a plane, and there was never enough, and nothing was ever good enough. Always, the more danced around, taunting her.

Twenty-six-year old Evelyn has always felt like an outsider among her old money peers. When she lands the recruitment job at the high society social media site People Like Us, she gets the opportunity to solidify her place with the 1% and finally earn her mother's approval. On the blind pursuit of status and wealth, Evelyn's actions get more and more ridiculous as she robotically ascends the social ladder. As her credit card debt mounts, her family encounters legal trouble that threatens the social status she has worked hard to build. Set in New England at the cusp of the the 2008 Great Recession, Everybody Rise is a cautionary tale about the the perils of social climbing and living in excess.

The world always said to just be yourself, but it turned out when Evelyn was herself, no guys were at all interested, so she was left with games of make-believe, expressing enthusiasm for whatever the men wanted to do, be it rock climbing or going to a cheese-beer pairing or a Knicks game.

I was so bored for the first third of the story, which in an almost 400 page book is a long time to be disinterested. Between the extravagant descriptions of wealthy people's properties and the main character's complete lack of personality, I was really struggling to get through the book. Evelyn might have been more interesting if we could get inside her head, but viewing her through a detached narrator was dull. I had a difficult time understanding how such a bland person managed to surround herself with such well-pedigreed friends, not that they were all that interesting either. The friends all have a role to play, especially Charlotte and Scot as the reality checks.

The four years since her Davidson graduation had gone by at once too slowly and too quickly, and Evelyn found herself in her mid-twenties without the life she had expected to have.

The turning point for me was the flashback to a boarding school term abroad in France (Chapter 11/33%). That chapter gave a brief glimpse of the moxie and sense of humor that might have attracted people to Evelyn. It also got more interesting when the Camilla, an A-List socialite and alpha female, started to play a bigger role. Camilla is a textbook frenemy, but Evelyn is too busy single-white-femaling her to notice! Evelyn's ennui will be relatable to many, but her thought processes gets more and more absurd as the novel goes on (and on and on and on). Evelyn is a social chameleon of sorts, but she is not a natural at it and makes plenty of awkward missteps. Once she gets a taste of the affluent lifestyle, Evelyn gets caught up in a world that is not her own and loses all sense of self and empathy.

You couldn’t cover up the smell of new money, sharp and plastic as a vinyl shower curtain just out of its box. You could try, layering over it with old houses, old furniture, and manners that mimicked those of people who’d been living this life for centuries. But unless your fortune was generations old, too, it—you—would never count in the same way.

Evelyn's mother Barbara is an interesting character. She went to great lengths to attempt to worm her and her family into the old money crowd and has always encouraged Evelyn to ingratiate herself with the elite. The sections with Evelyn and her mother have a distinctly 1950s-1960s feel. My visions of many of the scenes appeared Mad Men-esque, which is fitting given Evelyn and her mother's outdated view of the American aristocracy!

Everybody rise, everybody rise, everybody rise. That was exactly it, she thought. Upstairs, and outside, and in every street and every avenue of Manhattan, everybody was getting higher on a tide of money and ambition, swimming frantically and trying not to drown. And she? She didn’t have the energy to even tread water anymore.

I liked how the author took me from waiting for Evelyn to get her comeuppance for a large percent of the book, to making me feel sympathy for her. Many people can relate to changing an aspect of themselves or hiding something to prove themselves with a particular group, though maybe not to the same extremes as Evelyn (ex. Preston's secret). The book also addressed the double standards that exist between the classes (ex. the differing attitudes towards Evelyn & Jamie post-tryst, consequences for Evelyn's father vs. those on Wall Street). Evelyn's story ends, just as Wall Street's downturn is about to begin. Towards the end, I got the sense that the author was worried the reader wouldn't get the point of the book and she really hammered the point home.

She had been waiting, she thought. Always waiting. In New York, waiting for her life to be replaced by some other, more interesting life on offer. Waiting for money that she felt ought to be hers to flood in and elevate her position, from some male source, her father, Scot, Jaime. Waiting to be recognized and accepted in the social scene, starring on Appointment Book. When she thought about it, she had always imagined her future self in pictures with her face on others’ bodies, in others’ dresses, at others’ parties, in others’ poses. Now, back home, she had been biding time, waiting for some sign about what her life’s goal ought to be. Maybe it didn’t work like that. Maybe you had to change things step-by-step.

I was expecting something a little more juicy or something with a sense of humor, but it was more of a mildly entertaining moralistic tale with a very slow-start.

The same song in a different key; her trying to create a life that other people had deemed worthwhile, Evelyn fighting to prove herself once again.

*Beaumont, TX mention in Chapter 7. Not sure if Evelyn would have thought her father's job was so glamourous, if she actually saw where he was staying!

Evelyn is a young working woman in NYC who comes from a new money/social climbing family. In the beginning of the book she seems quite likable and appears more grounded than her high society desiring mother or her attorney father who has made millions winning class action lawsuits against pharmaceutical companies. Evelyn works for a new start-up social media platform called People Like Us, that is designed for the social elite and is by invitation only. Her strategy for getting important clients and being successful in her marketing job is to employ her relationships with college friends who are a part of the desired moneyed upper crust. Her prime target is an extremely famous young socialite, Camilla Rutherford. Thanks to some subtle maneuvering on Evelyn's part, she succeeds in signing up Camilla to the People Like Us site. Evelyn becomes entranced by Camilla and her life and begins to pander to her with some significant embellishment of the truth in order to gain her friendship. Evelyn becomes Camilla's new friend and project, and things go downhill quickly for her. Meanwhile, her father comes under investigation for false practices in his award-winning lawsuits. Rather than face up to her lies, Evelyn chooses to try to live them and finds herself further and further entrenched in trying to live a lifestyle that is far beyond her means.
As I read, I found myself becoming more and more frustrated by Evelyn. I finally reached the place where I became thoroughly disgusted by her. She becomes selfish and self-serving. Her life seems sure to become one giant train wreck with her ignoring both friends and family in a desperate attempt to retain her grasp on the rung of the social ladder. The hope of her finally coming to her senses was the sole thing that kept me reading.
This book was not my favorite. All of us have a certain interest in the lifestyles of the rich and famous, but I find people who cater to them to be shallow and base. Evelyn looses herself in her attempts to find societal success, and it's not an easy read to see her digging deeper and deeper into failure. There was some redemption in the end that I appreciated.
I think there is an audience for this book. Many people turn in multiple times a week to view "The Housewives" and enjoy an intimate look at how the elite live. I find these shows depressing and endlessly monotonous, but they obviously appeal to many people if their proliferation is any indication.
I thank the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read and review this title.

I love the cover of Everybody Rise. So much so that I even bought a pair of chandelier style earrings after seeing the cover (now you know just how shallow I am…and possibly how fitting this book really is! I should add that the earrings were from H&M – the cost of a cup of coffee. I’m not spending beyond my means unlike our heroine…) Before I get completely off track, I just have to say that Everybody Rise is a must read. Not for the summer, not for the winter, just full stop. It’s a wonderful tale of semi-modern New York (2006) that discusses class and wealth in ways not seen since Edith Wharton and F.Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a fun but cautionary tale, yet it’s never boring.

The story is about Evelyn, a young lady trying to make it in New York City. Her mother Barbara is a shameless social climber, sending Evelyn to the ‘right’ schools and berating her for not being married at 26. The story opens at a high school reunion (you have all my sympathy Evelyn). Evelyn has a new job at the start up People Like Us, which is a kind of Facebook meets Trip Advisor/Makeup Alley/Zomato for the moneyed crowd. She’s the membership advisor and she’s determined to get the crème de la crème of young New York society to join. To do that, she has to do some serious social climbing herself (even though Evelyn has always thought her mother’s attempts ridiculous).

Rising above the mainstream to the playpens of the rich and idle isn’t easy when you have to work for your money. Evelyn soon discovers running with the rich requires serious effort, money and spinning an intricate pack of lies. Meanwhile, her family is in trouble and her old friends are disgusted at the trouble she’s in. (For all her education, Evelyn still believes stuffing credit card bills in a drawer makes them go away). Then everything spirals out of control and Evelyn’s downfall is as swift as her rise. What will she do?

The story, although an old one, is brilliantly told. Clifford creates a world that you can’t help but be sucked into. It’s fast, flash and glamourous – who doesn’t want to hear about exclusive parties, fantastic weekends away and gorgeous fashion and foo? She sets up the character of Evelyn very well, encouraging the reader to like her before she becomes frankly, an utter idiot. Evelyn’s weak points are highlighted – she doesn’t feel as rich or deserving as her friends and this leads the reader to even feel a little bit sorry for her as she struggles to keep up with her new crowd. Evelyn’s downfall is something that you can’t look away from. It’s morbidly fascinating and I wondered several times how she would extricate herself from it.

When she does though, it’s somewhat of a letdown. It was all too neatly packaged for me (I swear I wouldn’t get out of a $60 000-odd credit card bill so quickly). I don’t know if I was secretly hoping for it all to be a terrible mess, as payback for the horrible person Evelyn had become or if I’d become used to the crazy things Evelyn was doing. The ending is somewhat redeeming as the Evelyn we once knew makes an appearance. Clifford has the ability to tell a cautionary tale with wit and wisdom in the modern era and make it a compulsive read. I adored it. I’d happily read anything she wrote!

Thanks to St. Martin's Press for the eARC. My review is honest.

http://samstillreading.wordpress.com

Everybody Rise, the debut novel by Stephanie Clifford, is a familiar story of old money and an outsider wanting to fit in. It is a character study about a young woman whose desire to fit in devolves into a web of lies. The book proceeds as I expect and ends as I expect with no real surprises. It's an okay story but not the next Edith Wharton that it's being publicized as.

Read my complete review at: http://www.memoriesfrombooks.com/2015/08/everybody-rise.html

Reviewed based on a copy received through a publisher’s giveaway. Thank you Shelf Awareness.

Evelyn Beegan, laid off by the publisher from her textbook marketing job, is now soliciting members for People Like Us, a quasi-Facebook type website designed for the ultra-rich. The rarified world of the social elite beckons Evelyn, who feels she has always been on the outside looking in, even at Sheffield Academy, the fancy prep school she attended. But, by using those prep school connections, Evelyn manages, by virtue of deceit and feigning social status, to infiltrate the ranks of the super-rich. Her actions set her up for the inevitable fall; the humiliation of discovery hovers but rationalizing her behavior and doing whatever she deems necessary to prove she belongs keeps Evelyn from realizing it.

There’s nothing particularly likable about Evelyn and many of the choices she makes are truly cringe-worthy. As a result, with nothing fresh or innovative about this often-told story, readers may experience a bit of schadenfreude at her expense.

The narrative is well-written, sometimes mesmerizing, and often touchingly eloquent, but the decidedly familiar morality tale it conveys will have readers easily predicting the denouement long before the final pages are reached.

Evelyn is a graduate of a tony prep school but is not on the inside. She's faked her way into a job at startup that's to cater to what in the US would be the landed gentry (read: the Old Monied) and she's in charge of recruitment. She decides to put her tenuous connections to this world to work and kill two birds with one stone and procure members while also ingratiating herself with the gilded butterfly at the top of the social heap. So begins this sad and if I'm honest, a bit overwrought, tale of the rise and fall of Evelyn Beegan in the halcyon days before the financial collapse of 2008, our Everywoman who dared like Icarus and burnt out trying to fly with her "betters".

This is a well done enough story but sadly, there was nothing new on this take of this well trod territory. I have a complicated relationship with ingratiators. I'm altogether fascinated and repelled by them so I rarely pass up the opportunity to read a story about another on the outside looking in who's trying to devise ways to actually gain access. Evelyn displayed all the usual hallmarks these characters tend to, complete with stark cravenness and blatant misuse of friendships all in order to get in with people who would have otherwise had no interest in her. I remain stunned that this is a thing. What Evelyn didn't do was make me feel anything for her beyond a vague and removed fascination. There wasn't anything that made her stand out in the pantheon of literary ingratiators and outsiders I've read about (Lee of Sittenfeld's Prep or Tom of Highsmith's The Talented Mr Ripley). I found that unfortunate and as such, I can't say this was a great and ground-breaking read, it was simply okay. While there are better novels on class and classism in America, this isn't a bad read. I'd recommend it to anyone who loves such stories or is even new to the type.

I was given a copy of this book by the publisher via Netgalley in exchange for my honest review.

*A free copy of this ebook was provided by NetGalley in exchange for an honest review* Thank you, NetGalley!

8/23/2015 7:59 AM
Mentioned in NYTimes. Sounds like one of the Auchincloss books I used to like.