Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan

Friends and Strangers by J. Courtney Sullivan
Published by Knopf ISBN 978052552059
Hardcover, $27.99, 416 pages

I'm a big fan of J. Courtney Sullivan's books, (her last one Saints for All Occasions was my favorite and made my list of the Most Compelling Books of 2017), because I want to meet all of her characters in real life.

Her latest novel publishes today, Friends and Strangers, and as always, her characters are so fascinating. Elizabeth is a new mom who has moved from Brooklyn to a small university town to be closer to her husband's parents.

She has been unable to meet the success of her first novel with her second one, and feels pressure to show people that the first one was not a fluke. Her husband Andrew left a good paying job to try and get his invention for barbeque grill that runs on solar power up and running.

Elizabeth spends a lot of time scrolling through her Brooklyn moms' Facebook group page, missing her friends. She decides that if she is going to write, she needs to leave the house to do it and hire a sitter for baby Gil.

She finds Sam, a student at the nearby university, who seems perfect. She bonds with baby Gil right away, and definitely needs the money Elizabeth will pay her. Sam doesn't come from money, like her roommate or most of the other students. She works in the kitchen at school, and sometimes feels more comfortable working with the older women in the kitchen than she does with her fellow students.

Sam also befriends Andrew's father (I adored him), who used to own a successful town car service until Uber came around and destroyed his business. Now he is going to lose his home, and he has become obsessed with the income inequality he sees. The gap between the top one percent of earners and the rest of the country disturbs him and he has formed a small group of people trying to raise awareness. Sam becomes intrigued and joins his cause.

Elizabeth is seeking a friend, and she becomes close to Sam. Sam comes over for Sunday dinner every week and stays to watch TV with Elizabeth, and Elizabeth frets over Sam's romance with an older man she met in London. The line between employer and employee becomes blurred.

Every character in Friends and Strangers is so intriguing and realistic. Like Kiley Reid's  Such A Fun Age, the book dives into class, money, marriage, family, older women and younger women, the meaning of friendship, employers and employees. I liked Friends and Strangers better.

I found myself thinking about the characters long after I finished the book, a sign that it is a good book for me. I felt that Sullivan brilliantly captured the struggles of college student who feels torn, the challenges of a new mother in a new place, and a man who finds the career he built gone due to changing times. I highly recommend Friends and Strangers, and once again Jenna Bush Hager and I agree as she chose it for her Read With Jenna book club on the Today Show for July.