Rich and Pretty

February 15, 2016
Alam’s debut is a sweet yet cutting exploration of the bonds of friendship in competitive New York City. Sarah and Lauren have been best friends since high school, through college, love, jobs, and the realities of adult life. Lauren works as an associate editor for a publisher of cookbooks, is single, and pursues a carefree, on-the-go lifestyle that offers no prospect of settling down. Sarah, the daughter of a retired singer and a former advisor to the president, leads a charmed, career-free life. Recently engaged to pedestrian Dan, Sarah hopes the wedding will be a low-key affair but is anxious her socialite parents will keep that from happening. As a way to reconnect and keep her parents at bay, Sarah asks Lauren to be her maid of honor and help plan the wedding. Alam moves the story forward with seamless transitions from Sarah to Lauren’s voice, punctuated by scenes of biting dialogue; however, the interplay of voices never serves as an integral part of the plot, and rambling takes over in sections. In the run-up to the wedding, the closeness Sarah was hoping to reignite looks forever extinguished when Lauren misbehaves on a bachelorette trip. As Sarah’s life moves forward, will she come to realize that there is nothing wrong with growing up, even if that means growing apart from Lauren? With astute descriptions of how values, tastes, desires, and ambitions change over two decades, Alam’s tale of a divergent friendship smartly reflects the trial and error nature of finding a mate and deciding how to grow up.

January 1, 2016

Upper-crust Sarah works at a charity while plotting the perfect wedding. Wayward self-starter Lauren works in publishing (well, she would) and avoids all questions of marriage. Best friends for 20 years, they've been distanced by different choices and values. Interestingly, this debut is written by a guy.

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 1, 2016
This debut novel about two close childhood pals trying to maintain a friendship as their adult paths gradually diverge has an amiable familiarity. Lauren and Sarah have been BFFs since sixth grade, when Lauren, an 11-year-old from a middle-class New Jersey family, snagged a scholarship to a fancy private school in Manhattan and was immediately befriended by popular Sarah, her ambassador to the world of the wealthy. Sarah is rich. Lauren is pretty. Sarah volunteers for worthy projects and works part time in a charity thrift store, goes to the gym, lunches with friends, has Sunday night dinner with her conservative political adviser father and her mother, a retired singer of moderate renown, in their large, eclectically elegant home. Lauren lives in a tiny yet stylish Brooklyn apartment and ekes out a modest living in book publishing, slowly climbing the editorial ladder and, for a while anyway, bedding the temp. Sarah lives in a Manhattan two-bedroom with a foyer, a separate kitchen and ample closet space (ah, fiction) and is busily planning her wedding to her doctor fiance--trying on dresses, sampling slices of cake. Lauren, her maid of honor, is uninterested in committing to a romantic relationship and not above a casual tryst with, say, a waiter at a resort hotel during Sarah's pre-wedding girlfriend getaway. These women still understand each other in a way no one else may, but they've drifted apart since the days of middle school sleepovers, high school and college parties, and a stint as post-college roomies. "Things change, in life--of course they do," Alam writes, of Sarah's perspective. "People grow up, become interested in new things, new people. Our way of being in the world is probably a lot less fixed than most people think. But Lauren is a part of her world, and she's a part of Lauren's." Lauren, though, wonders if her friendship with Sarah has survived solely by "force of habit." Although Alam seems to have no deep new insight to share and his story is thin on plot, his characters are real and rounded enough to escape being entirely cliche, and he displays a robust understanding of and affection for the nuances of female friendships as they evolve over time. Alam captures something truthful and essential about the push-pull of friendship--the desire for closeness as well as the space to define ourselves--and admirably resists the urge to look down on his characters.

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