The After Party

February 15, 2016
DiSclafani’s second novel, following The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, is an intriguing story about the complexities of female friendship and the intricate social hierarchy of Houston’s oil elite in the 1950s. In a world focused on glamor and status, Joan Fortier has always been the center of attention, but no one loves her as much as her best friend, Cece. Friends since age five, Joan and Cece share a complicated past. Told from Cece’s perspective, the narrative cuts back and forth between 1957, when they’re in their mid-20s, and their adolescence, when Joan seems set up for the kind of privileged existence that Cece once assumed they both wanted—marriage, a family, and fancy parties. However, Joan seems to want more. To Cece, Joan seems vibrant and free, but it’s not until later that she realizes no woman in this particular society, not even Joan, can completely escape the social limitations imposed by gender. The narrative sometimes succumbs to stereotypes, but the social milieu—and the attitudes that these women alternately embrace and rebel against—is vivid, and the relationship between Joan and Cece becomes increasingly compelling as the story progresses, resulting in a most memorable read. Agent: Dorian Karchmar, WME Entertainment.

February 15, 2016
In her tale of a fraught lifelong friendship, DiSclafani (The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, 2013) again investigates the power and perils of female sexuality.Oil-rich 20th-century Houston is the atmospheric setting: in the privileged world Joan Fortier and Cecilia "Cece" Buchanan inhabit, women have little to do besides redecorate their lavish houses, attend meetings of various social clubs, and drunkenly while away the evenings--with or without their businessman husbands--at the Shamrock Hotel's Cork Club. It's typical of the power distribution in their relationship that narrator Cece's first name is also Joan, but she's gone by her middle name ever since they started kindergarten together in 1937. Now it's 1957, and Cece is the wife of solid, stable Ray and mother to 3-year-old Tommy, whose failure to talk is her one real concern. But she spends plenty of time worrying over single, scandalous Joan anyway; the girls' closeness was cemented by the two-plus years Cece lived with the Fortiers after her mother died while she was in high school, and the worrying began when Joan ran away for a year in 1950. Cece can't understand why Joan yearns for the wider world beyond Texas, and she strives constantly to protect her friend from the consequences of her reckless behavior in censorious Houston. Her obsession with Joan is a source of tension in her marriage, and it's a problem for the novel too; a predictable pattern emerges of Joan acting out, Cece fussing, and Ray seething. We see that Cece has poured all the emotions stymied by her difficult, critical mother and largely absent father into her feelings for Joan, but after a while her neediness is as frustrating to the reader as to Ray. When Joan's secret emerges, it's painful but predictable. Nonetheless, DiSclafani paints a rich portrait of a cloistered society and its damaged inhabitants in a consistently absorbing narrative. A bit of a sophomore slump, but this talented newcomer's gifts for characterization and atmosphere are as sharp as ever.

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Starred review from May 15, 2016
DiScalafani (The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, 2013) follows up her debut best-seller with another spellbinding historical novel, this time set in 1950s Texas. Cece and Joan have been best friends since kindergarten, growing up in the tony Houston neighborhood of River Oaks, saturated with oil money, marching toward the inevitable: debutante balls, women's college, Junior League, suitable marriages, and lives of respectable luxury. Narrated by Cece from an unspecified present day, The After Party is a lushly written novel of a symbiotic friendship. Cece's recollections of her relationship with the beautiful, rebellious socialite Joan over the years reveal the depths of her obsession. Cece has defined her own life in terms of her proximity to Joan, to the detriment of her own once happy marriage, fixed in place by a dark secret from their shared girlhood. The thick and clingy atmosphere, peppered with meticulously detailed descriptions of the day-to-day concerns of the midcentury moneyed class in Texas, paints an alluring portrait of the alcohol-soaked, seedy reality of high society, roiling just beneath the placid veneer of mannered respectability. Deliberate pacing and the hypnotic quality of DiScalafani's writing will entrance readers as the novel slowly burns toward a series of shocking revelations. Literary fansas well as those who enjoy historical and women's fictionwill be delighted.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

May 15, 2016

Houston socialites and BFFs Cece Buchanan and Joan Fortier have been the toast of River Oaks since their preschool days. With the 1950s in full swing and the girls in high school, Cece comes to live with the Fortiers after her mother dies. She acts as defender and constant companion for the willful, hard-partying Joan. When Joan abruptly skips the debutante ball to seek stardom in Hollywood, Cece is devastated but forges new friendships and begins dating her future husband, Ray. When Joan blows back into Houston, mysterious beau in tow and ready to step back into the Shamrock Hotel party scene, Cece senses that Joan is carrying secrets. As she adopts a predictable upper-class life of marriage, motherhood, and garden-club luncheons, can Cece balance Joan's burdens with her own? Best-selling author DiSclafani (The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls) paints a compelling picture of the ups and downs of longstanding female friendship set against the excesses and restraints of the Mad Men era. VERDICT Readers' opinions will vary on whether the revelation of Joan's dark secret is satisfying, but such strongly wrought characters and attention to period setting and mores should enthrall most fan of novels of intricate relationships and society such as those by Mary McCarthy, Rebecca Wells, Fannie Flagg, and Jill Connor Brown. [See Prepub Alert, 11/2/15.]--Jennifer B. Stidham, Houston Community Coll. Northeast

Copyright 2016 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 1, 2015

DiSclafani follows up her daring debut, the New York Times best-selling The Yonahlossee Riding Camp for Girls, with a new work set in oil-rich 1950s Texas. Glittering blonde Joan Fortier loves living on the edge. But when she goes too far, best friend Cece Buchanan, married and with a toddler, risks everything to pull her back. Book club pitch and NPR interviews.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.