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.

Friday 5ive- May 22, 2020

Welcome to the Friday 5ive, a blog post about five things that caught my attention this week. There seems to be more and more people out and about in NYC as this shelter-in-place continues on. Grocery and drug stores have honed their customer policies and in general people seem to respect the rules. (The exception was last weekend when young people were congregating outside bars at night on the Upper East Side- that was a problem.)

1) We got to spend time with our kids, and one night we played a game called The Contender that my daughter-in-law bought for us all to play. It's a card game similiar to Cards Against Humanity, but geared towards presidential politics. Cards have quotes from presidential candidates, and you have to come up with the best answer from your five cards. What I found interesting was that there were many names of candidates that I was unfamiliar with, and our family follows politics closely. It's a great game for fans of history and politics, entertaining and informative. We had so much fun! (There were a lot of LBJ and Nixon quotes as those two are very quotable.)

2)  While upstate with our kids, we celebrated a belated Mother's Day with a barbeque. The day started with my son's girlfriend making me Avocado Toast and it was so delicious! I can't pick out a ripe avocado to save my life, but she has the knack for choosing the best ones. 

Avocado Toast

For dessert, the kids picked out a wonderful vanilla cake with blueberries and strawberries and whipped cream frosting. They found it at DeCicco & Sons  grocery store. They also picked up some rainbow cookies that were tasty too. My crafty daughter-in-law made me a beautiful card with her Cricut. It's so pretty!

3)  On Wednesday night I watched the concert performance of Bombshell by the cast of the NBC's gone-too-soon show Smash. The show, about the mounting of the Broadway show Bombshell based on the life of Marilyn Monroe, ran for two seasons in 2012. In 2015, a concert performance of Bombshell, with the original cast was held in NYC and that was streamed last night as a benefit for The Actors' Fund. The performers, including Katherine McPhee, Megan Hilty, Christian Borle, Brian d'Arcy James, and Leslie Odom Jr. are amazing. Watch it here for a limited time.

4) The Book Expo that was scheduled for this week was cancelled this year due to COVID-19. One of the opening events is the Editors' Book Buzz, where a selection of editors share one of the books they are most excited about publishing. Cameron Esposito hosted a Zoom event on Wednesday with six editors and it worked wonderfully. Usually we are in a packed room with hundreds of people and it is difficult to hear, but on Zoom, we could see each editor clearly and up close as we listened to them talk about books. I loved the format! I will post about the event next week, and every book there has been added to my TBR list.

5) I'm a big fan of J. Courtney Sullivan's books, and her upcoming novel, Friends and Strangers, is another home run for her. It's about a woman (who with her husband and new baby moves from Brooklyn to a college town community upstate) and the young college student she hires to care for her son while she writes her next book. There is so much in this book- class, economic equality, marriage and family issues- it's fantastic. Fans of Kiley Reid's Such A Fun Age will enjoy it, I liked it even more than Reid's book. A full review will post soon. 

I just started Hannah Mary McKinnon's Sister Dear about a young woman who finds discovers a family secret that sets off a dangerous chain of events. My full review will post on Tuesday. 

I hope you all have a safe, healthy and happy Memorial Day weekend.