Jillian Medoff

I liked about 90% of this workplace drama. It got a little ridiculous at points but the underlying idea of how you spend so much time with your co-workers that they are almost family and yet there is so much you don’t know and the relationships are so tied to the office they almost never survive without it.

I think the author lost steam on some threads and abandoned them which I found frustrating and she spent too much time on unnecessary footnotes which I found annoying and gimmicky.

Overall thumbs up.… (mais)

Eeee. This book was something. It was a well written story, with thought-out characters & complicated family dynamics, but I still somehow want to erase it from my brain. Many things in this book made me physically ill— one thing in particular is on my list of “no” subjects. So yeah, a brain scrub would be nice.

I feel this book was trying just a little too hard to be a metoo book. Me Too is mentioned several times, and all the drama with all the bad men just seemed like A Lot. Also, It tried too hard to point out all the inequities and the “life is just not fair”s- but it was all in passing like, yup this is the way it is, too bad, so sad. And bam, we’ve moved on to Cassie’s very important problems.… (mais)

What a ride! When her brother's ex accuses him of rape, Cassie knows it's not true. Her wealthy, somewhat dysfunctional family summons her home to present a united front. But the rape investigation forces Cassie to face some uncomfortable truths about her own past. Her affair with a much older married man may not be as innocent as she desperately tries to make it.

Much of this book centers on a night in March when Billy and Diana drunkenly leave a party. However, since the narrator, Cassie, was not present for most of the key events, the reader discovers the twists, turns and conflicting evidence about Diana and Billy's relationship through courtroom testimony.

The reader quickly discovers that Cassie's not the most truthful of narrators, fully comfortable with rewriting history to serve her narrative. As she breezily introduces the readers to the glitzy world of trust fund millionaires, and her sometimes contentious relationship with her adopted parents and brothers, the story beneath the story starts to peek through. Cassie's a complicated character, fierce yet vulnerable and damaged, manipulative yet loving, and a fighter for what she wants and perceives as truth. The more you get to know her, the more she tugs at your heartstrings.

A profound take on the Me Too movement set amidst a world of wealth and privilege.… (mais)

Cassie receives a call from her brother Nate that their younger brother, Billy, has been arrested for rape. Cassie knows that he is innocent. When Cassie returns home from her studies at Yale, she is asked to stand by her brother and family in the courtroom. Her parents, Lawrence and Eleanor, are extremely wealthy, and their wealth buys them the best lawyers.
But, as Billy stands trial, Det. Haggerty asks Cassie to tell her own story. As she does, some very disturbing truths about the family come to light.
This was a very difficult book for me to read because I struggled with the subject. It made me ill to think of what Cassie had been subjected to in her young life. I anguished over her and her feelings and how she was manipulated.… (mais)