Peyton Marcus, the fabulous morning news anchor for ANN, was working out on the treadmill when she saw the breaking news that her husband was being arrested. And if that wasn’t bad enough, she was watching it play out on her news channel, voiced by her co-host Jim, who she had just been on the air with.
Jim had left the studio before she had, but apparently while she’d left to get to her workout, he’d doubled back for the breaking news and got to tell the world that Peyton’s husband, Isaac, had just been arrested in the second round of parents accused of buying their children’s ways into college.
Peyton knew the story of those parents. She’d reported on it. Now Isaac was being handcuffed and put in the back of a car, and she had to do something. She left her gym and ran the blocks to get to him before they took him away, and she got there before he’d left but well after the paparazzi had gotten there, to get the photos of her in her workout clothes. Isaac tells her not to say anything to anyone, and as he’s put in the car, their doorman escorts Peyton inside, away from the cameras, and puts her in the elevator to her apartment.
And when their daughter Max sees the news, she is devastated. She and Peyton had always had a contentious relationship, but Max had always been able to count on her father. Isaac had been the non-judgmental parent, Max’s safe place, but now he apparently doesn’t think she can get into Princeton on her own and had to bribe someone to get her in. She wasn’t even the one who wanted Princeton. She had wanted to go to film school on the West Coast, but Isaac had gone to Princeton. Now, Max can’t bring herself to talk to him, and Peyton doesn’t know how to fix their family.
While Peyton’s life is falling apart so publicly, her sister Skye is struggling with her own private pain. She and her husband Gabe had moved to Paradise for the school, a great public school for their adopted daughter Aurora. But now Aurora is six, and Skye is bored. She was well educated, and she’d been a teacher in Harlem and before that in Africa. But she became a stay-at-home mom for Aurora, and now her contemporaries are heading up non-profits and establishing new schools in underdeveloped countries, she is the co-leader for Girl Scouts and the snack mom when needed.
Skye has been working on a small non-profit of her own, a house where 8 girls from Harlem could come live in Paradise and get a good education, create opportunities for themselves that they might not get in city schools. But as she’s waiting for her financing to come through, she’s in a holding pattern and finding it harder and harder to figure out what it is she really wants to do with her life.
As these two sisters try to straighten out their respective lives and take responsibility for their choices, will they figure out how to repair everything’s that gone wrong? Or will they lose their lifelong sister bond along with everything else they once cared about?
Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty is a powerful story of the family bonds that pull us apart and hold us together. Author Lauren Weisberger, best known for her first novel The Devil Wears Prada, has written yet another compelling story about the relationships that break us and make us, and the decisions that we make that push us towards our dreams or take us in the wrong direction.
I liked Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty a lot. I had a hard time setting it aside when I needed to do other things. But with the story line of the college bribery, I was expecting the story to be a little juicier, to throw a little more dirt around. Instead of going there though, Weisberger focuses on the family relationships and how the small decisions made when you’re maybe not paying full attention can have cruel consequences for someone else. Sassy and smart, humble and healing, Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty is a story, ultimately, of hope and redemption, which makes it a lovely tale to get lost in for a while.
Egalleys for Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty were provided by Random House Publishing Group through NetGalley, with many thanks.
