Fans of Lauren Weisberger will enjoy this glimpse into the life of a media star and her family, with its emphasis on a ripped-from-the-headlines college admissions scandal and on the competitively privileged suburbs. Fans will also probably be more willing than I was to overlook the bland obliviousness of the ultra-privileged characters and narrative tone. I enjoy reading books about rich and/or awful people as much as the next beach reader, but I'm not sure this book is aware that its characters actually ARE awful. And some of their snobbiness just kind of makes no sense - like when Skye, a protagonist, and her friend mock another parent's name choice of Magnolia as "dramatic"...while Skye's kid is named Aurora. I just don't get what's going on here, if I'm being honest. These characters spend an awful lot of time judging and belittling the priorities, values, and taste levels of those around them...considering how legitimately insufferable and dismissively privileged they themselves are.

The story demands that the reader sympathize with a mom who engaged in a little light fraud in order to give her kid a leg up in getting into an Ivy League school, so maybe my expectations needed some adjusting. But I thought there’d be a little more self-awareness from the book as a whole, just a smidge more of a satirical touch when it came to these class-obsessed characters. And there really isn’t. That’s probably why the chapters from the POV of this mom, Peyton, are by far the most successful. As the parent whose obsession with her family’s perfection led to criminal actions, she has less room to pretend she’s holier than thou. Her sister Skye, on the other hand, a former teacher and now stay-at-home mom who yearns for professional fulfillment, just swans around through most of the book being a total snot about every other suburban mom she interacts with, like she’s somehow better than them because she...doesn’t wear yoga pants? She even manages to be inexplicably snobby about libraries having online renewal, a bit I fully do not understand. I could NOT bring myself to care about Skye’s envy of her former colleagues’ voluntourism work or her drama, involving getting way into debt buying furniture and decor for the girls’ residence home she’s starting as a charity/return to feeling smug about her work again.
Peyton’s daughter, Max, also gets POV chapters, and these scenes are the least successful mostly because Weisberger isn’t particularly strong at writing a teenage voice, but also because Max is genuinely an innocent here - albeit a fairly insufferable one in her own right - and there just isn’t much to cover in her chapters. She didn’t know about the fraud in the first place, she spends the majority of the book mad at the wrong parent, and she doesn’t have a lot going on - she gets rejected from the college she didn't even want to go to, she makes some friends, she has a successful vlog...okay. Whatever. She's somehow relatively flawless, so her journey, such as it is, never engaged me.

A lot of my problems with this book can be summed up in the fact that Skye never wears a single bit of makeup, and she doesn’t think about calories when she eats, all of which makes her better than Peyton and the other rich moms! But don’t worry, her complexion is flawless and she’s naturally slim, so she’s still acceptable as a POV character! It's all just a lot of hypocrisy and bewildering snobbish distinctions that don't...really...make sense??

It’s a readable book, I’ll give it that - fast and easy, smoothly written other than the handful of jarringly confusing "wait, but why are you being snotty about that?" moments. But it’s ultimately just a lot of nothing in insufferable packaging, and not really worth the time.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for the advance copy in exchange for an honest review.