Social Engagement

December 1, 2022

Within hours of getting married, Callie Holt knows that she's made a mistake. With her dull financier husband passed out, she eats pizza in their bathtub at a swank wedding venue while scrolling through old photographs on her phone, trying to figure out what went wrong. Could it have something to do with mega-rich friend Virginia and the uncomfortable things she's learned about Virginia's family? A peek at the millennial marriage scene from debuter Forrey; with a 100,000 copy first printing.

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April 1, 2023
A young woman's retrospective on a year that changed everything. It's six hours after Callie Holt's wedding, and her marriage is already over. While lounging in her pizza-stained wedding dress in the honeymoon suite's bathtub (which she compares to a casket), Callie scrolls through photos on her phone and lands on one she took with her best friend, Virginia Murphy, on the day they moved in together. Callie thinks the day of the picture "marked the rising...of the strangest year of my life--the bright start of an arc that could only end in darkness." From there, Forrey transports us back 13 months so we can witness the disaster unfold. Callie has just moved into an apartment on New York's Upper East Side owned by Virginia's parents, Mimi and Walter. They have known Callie since she was a child and love her like she was one of their own. Except Callie is not one of them, a fact that she's constantly reminded of because of their money and her lack thereof. When Callie has a meet-cute with handsome Whit Harris on the subway, it seems like her life may be finally falling into place--except that she can't stop thinking about Virginia's cousin Ollie, whom she secretly dated in college and whose carelessness with her feelings leaves her constantly trying to prove that she's worthy of his love. Combine this with an eating disorder, friendship jealousy, and trauma from losing her father when she was a teenager, and Callie's growing relationship with Whit starts to take a back seat. The novel centers mostly on the year leading up to the wedding but includes some flashbacks, particularly to Callie's college days, and flash-forwards to the wedding. The novel is overcrowded, and the subplot of Callie's trying to finish her late father's novel in progress feels pretty muddied. Despite the book's flaws, Forrey's gift for making the everyday feel compelling shines throughout. An absorbing, if sometimes unconvincing, novel about the trials of navigating adulthood.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

April 14, 2023
On the night of her wedding, browsing social media, Callie Holt wonders why her seven-hour-old marriage has already failed. That is, she knows why it has failed, but wonders when the failure began. In the year leading up to her marriage, Callie moves in with her oldest friend, Virginia Murphy, whose wealthy parents foot the bill for their Upper East Side apartment, attends half a dozen weddings (including Virginia's sister's Amalfi coast wedding), and is reunited with Virginia's cousin--and her old flame--Ollie. Over the same year, Callie questions her childhood memories as well as the reality of her former romance with Ollie and her current romance with the kind-but-boring Whit. How much has Callie sacrificed, over the years, by being so closely tied to this wealthy family while having very little means of her own? The questions smolder while Callie's life seems to burn all around her. Her friendship with Virginia hangs in the balance--not to mention her marriage--as she comes to terms with who she is and what she wants. Sharp, funny, and incisive.

COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

June 5, 2023
Forrey, coauthor of How to Skimm Your Life, makes her fiction debut with a smart and appealing chronicle of a woman reexamining her life on her wedding night. As a middle-class child spending summers at the beach in Rhode Island, Callie Holt befriends wealthy Virginia Murphy and her cousin Ollie. She obtains a scholarship to attend Brown University with Ollie and Virginia, where she strikes up a romantic relationship with Ollie that he urges her to keep secret. After college, Callie, whose late father, Walter, was an unpublished novelist, gives up on her dreams of a career as an artist to work in communications, while Ollie and Virginia have the means to focus on photography and painting, respectively. Several years later, Callie moves into a Murphy family pied-à-terre in New York City with Virginia, where she discovers Walter’s unfinished novel in a chest of drawers. As she reads it, Callie comes to suspect that her father had an affair with Virginia’s mother. Adding to the drama are Callie’s lingering feelings for Ollie, and Ollie and Virginia’s plagiarizing of Callie’s artwork. The author wrings plenty of tension from Callie’s complicated relationship with her benefactors, and portrays the book’s multifaceted characters with honesty and tenderness, especially as events build toward a climactic wedding-night confrontation. Readers will enjoy this heartfelt story. Agent: Allison Hunter, Trellis Literary Management.