Lauren Mechling

After a devastating break-up, Geraldine is struggling to get her life back on track in Toronto. Her two old best friends are living their best lives in New York. Sick of watching from the sidelines, Geraldine decides to move there too, finding herself in the downtown art scene and rooftop party circuit. She soon discovers how hard it is to find a footing in a world of media darlings. Hilarious and fiercely observed, How Could She is a novel of female friendship, an insider's look into the cutthroat world of New York media, and a witty exploration of the ways we can and cannot escape our pasts.

A Novel

How Could She

Rachel Dodes

"A total joyride of a novel. The Memo is a funny, fascinating exploration of love, friendship, ambition and what it truly means to live a good life. I loved it."--J. Courtney Sullivan, New York Times bestselling author of Commencement, Maine, and Friends and Strangers If you could rewrite your life story, would you dare? That's the question at the heart of this charming and propulsive debut novel about love, life, and a woman finding herself and what it means to be happy and successful. Do you ever feel like your life doesn't measure up to everyone else's--and wonder if you just didn't get the memo helping you make the right choices? Jenny Green dreads her upcoming college reunion. Once top of her class, the thirty-five-year-old finds herself stuck in a life that isn't the one she expected. Her promising career has flamed out (literally) and her deadbeat boyfriend is cheating on her (again). All her friends seem to have it all figured it out, enjoying glittering lives and careers that she can only envy from the sidelines. Did she just not get the memo they all did? As it turns out, she didn't! When she arrives at her alma mater for the festivities, she receives a text from an unlisted number. "Jenny Green: please collect your memo." Somewhere on campus, a discreet female-led organization provides comprehensive memos to select students, a set of instructions that are a blueprint for success. The first time around, Jenny didn't receive hers. Now, she's being given the second chance she wants--an opportunity to relive her life and make all the right decisions this time around. But at what price? Smart, addictive, bittersweet, and ultimately triumphant, The Memo will enchant readers of In Five Years and Cassandra in Reverse as well as fans of Emma Straub and Maria Semple.

The Memo

Dream Girl

Reconciled with her friends and enjoying life with her father in New York City, fifteen-year-old Mimi hopes for a happier second term at the progressive Baldwin School but soon finds herself drawn into complications involving the school's finances, her father's new girlfriend, and her own romantic entanglements.

more tales of a 10th-grade social climber

All Q, no A

Laura Moser

The Social Climber Abroad

Foreign Exposure

When her best friend dares her to become part of the popular crowd and record her experiences in a diary, fifteen-year-old Mimi's world turns upside down when the diary gets into the wrong hands. Original.

The Rise and Fall of a 10th-grade Social Climber

The Rise and Fall of a Teenage Social Climber

Reconciled with her friends and enjoying life with her father in New York City, fifteen-year-old Mimi hopes for a happier second term at the progressive Baldwin School but soon finds herself drawn into complications involving the school's finances, her fa

More Tales of a 10th-grade Social Climber

All Q, No A

Zoe Siegal

When Mimi moves to the city, she has to change school, and move in with her dad. She develops a crush on her dad's lodger quicker than a blink, until she realises he might just be her dad's boyfriend... And at school she's making similar faux pas. Unsure which clique she should belong to, Mimi tries to play the prim prom queens off against the too cool for school beatniks - and ends up losing out on both. And when she steals the most popular girl in school's boyfriend, there's hell to pay... A coming of age story about friendship and betrayal, about appearances and what lies beneath.

Confessions of a Social Climber

CLAIRE VOYANTE HAS been having strange visions ever since she can remember. But the similarity between her name and her talents is purely coincidental. The name is French, and unlike the psychics on TV, she can’t solve crimes or talk to the dead. Whenever Claire follows her hunches, she comes up empty—or ends up in pretty awkward situations. But that all changes on Claire’s 15th birthday, when her grandmother, Kiki—former socialite, fashion icon, and permanent fixture at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel—gives her something a little more extraordinary than one of her old cocktail dresses: a strange black-and-white onyx cameo on a gold chain. It’s not long before Claire’s world becomes a whole lot clearer. And a whole lot more dangerous.

"Brilliant. . . . The perfect summer read." --Nylon "[A] compulsively readable page-turner." --Cosmopolitan An assured and savagely funny novel about three old friends as they navigate careers, husbands, an ex-fiancé, new suitors, and, most important, their relationships with one another After a devastating break-up with her fiancé, Geraldine is struggling to get her life back on track in Toronto. Her two old friends, Sunny and Rachel, left ages ago for New York, where they've landed good jobs, handsome husbands, and unfairly glamorous lives (or at least so it appears to Geraldine). Sick of watching from the sidelines, Geraldine decides to force the universe to give her the big break she knows she deserves, and moves to New York City. As she zigzags her way through the downtown art scene and rooftop party circuit, she discovers how hard it is to find her footing in a world of influencers and media darlings. Meanwhile, Sunny's life as an It Girl watercolorist is not nearly as charmed as it seemed to Geraldine from Toronto. And Rachel is trying to keep it together as a new mom, writer, and wife--how is it that she was more confident and successful at twenty-five than in her mid-thirties? Perhaps worst of all, why are Sunny and Rachel--who've always been suspicious of each other--suddenly hanging out without Geraldine? Hilarious and fiercely observed, How Could She is an essential novel of female friendship, an insider's look into the cutthroat world of New York media--from print to podcasting--and a witty exploration of the ways we can and cannot escape our pasts.

Claire Voyante's dreams lead her to investigate the New York secret society that her best friend is being initiated into, while at the same time she tries to keep her own psychic powers a secret.

Dream Life

When fifteen-year-old Claire Voyante's grandmother gives her a cameo for her birthday, she starts having dreams that seem to be telling her something that has to do with her new, wealthy friend being in danger.

Mimi’s aiming to infiltrate her exclusive high school’s coolest clique, but it may not go as planned . . . “An irresistible read” (Booklist). After the collapse of her parents’ marriage, Mimi Schulman leaves her mother in Houston to look after her befuddled photographer father in New York. She’s too preoccupied with family problems to think much about her new life. But then Mimi’s first hour at the Baldwin School—an institution where teachers offer psychoanalysis instead of grades and students hold cocktail parties in the bathroom between classes—leaves her spinning. When her childhood best friend bets her she can’t befriend the “cool girls,” Mimi accepts the challenge—only to discover that social climbing in New York is no easy task. Fitting in with the popular girls back in Texas was nothing compared to joining Baldwin’s clique of raccoon-eyed waifs . . . Rubbing shoulders with the offspring of diplomats and celebrities, all with secrets and dysfunctions, Mimi finds herself moving from one bizarre situation to the next—a fake-ID deli, a topless bar, a Jacuzzi in Trump Tower—and in the position of winning a bet that threatens to make her lose sight of herself, in this novel with lots of heart and a wicked sense of humor.

Lauren Mechling

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