Publishers Weekly
06/05/2023
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 After college, Callie, whose late father, Walter, was an unpublished novelist, gives up on her dreams of a career as an artist to work in communications, while Ollie and Virginia have the means to focus on photography and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. (May)
From the Publisher
"Millennial wedding culture gets a much-needed skewering in this alternately light and biting novel." — Vogue
"If you’re looking for a page-turner with some bite, this one’s for you." — theSkimm
"If your summer 2023 calendar is booked with weddings, bridal showers, and bachelorettes, you'll appreciate this novel that cleverly explores the darker side of the wedding industrial complex and all the ways it manifests online." — Harper’s Bazaar
"This is a story about a wedding gone wrong, a bride with regrets, and the role of social media in creating false narratives about relationships. ... Poignant. ... A perfect gift for someone planning a wedding." — Zibby Owens, Katie Couric Media
“Social Engagement, Forrey’s debut novel and a uniquely 21st-century mystery, runs with a pretty clever conceit, a detective story using the detritus of social media as the clues they are.” — Buzzfeed
"Like a candy-colored wedding favor with a daringly dark center, Avery Carpenter Forrey’s Social Engagement is as mordant and incisive as it is utterly delectable. And its growing emotional heft makes it linger long after its bittersweet final pages." — Megan Abbott, New York Times bestselling author of The Turnout
“I picked up Social Engagement to read one chapter and didn’t put it down until I finished it later that night. This novel is a masterful and sharp exploration of friendship, family, class, and social media. Forrey’s debut is twisty and absorbing, full of family secrets and millennial weddings, and you won’t want to miss it!” — Jennifer Close, bestselling author of Girls in White Dresses and Marrying the Ketchups
“Social Engagement is a witty and addictive behind-the-scenes account of today’s highly curated and hashtagged wedding world. Clear your weekend and prepare to fall in love with this delicious debut.” — Lauren Weisberger, bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada and Where the Grass Is Green and the Girls Are Pretty
“I can’t remember the last time I read a book that so perfectly captures the humor, absurdity, and anguish of how we live now. Avery Carpenter Forrey’s prose will cut you to the bone—it’s wickedly funny, and keenly observant about matters ranging from real estate to Instagram to the perils of the wedding industrial complex. This is an astounding debut.” — Grant Ginder, author of The People We Hate at the Wedding and Let's Not Do That Again
“Unputdownable and razor-sharp, Social Engagement is an addictive ride through the ultra-relatable highs and lows of a woman navigating millennial wedding culture and her own path to love and meaning in a screen-filled world. Forrey's is a fresh new voice in fiction that effuses wit and heart in equal measure; I joyfully devoured her stunning debut.” — Carola Lovering, author of Tell Me Lies and Too Good to Be True
“Avery Carpenter Forrey’s Social Engagement is a bitingly funny, acutely self-aware coming-of-age story about growing up on the edge of the inside, close enough to feel the allure of money and power but not enough to be stupefied or protected by it. A wedding novel that begins after the glass is broken and the wedding dress is stained, I raced through it to find out how the champagne-drenched pieces would come together.” — Isabel Kaplan, author of NSFW
"In clever, taut prose exploring our obsession with the tiny screens that shape our stories, Social Engagement somehow feels both modern and timeless—in exposing the ugly (yet universal) parts of ourselves we prefer to hide, Forrey reveals the ways in which we try, and try again, to love ourselves—and other people—properly. A thought-provoking debut with an unsettlingly relatable protagonist you’ll wish you could include in your group chat." — Caitlin Barasch, author of A Novel Obsession
“A smart and appealing chronicle of a woman reexamining her life on her wedding night. … [Carpenter Forrey] 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.” — Publishers Weekly
“Forrey’s gift for making the everyday feel compelling shines throughout. … An absorbing novel about the trials of navigating adulthood.” — Kirkus Reviews
"A fun and fast read that reveals what can happen if we remove all the filters in our lives and strip the world down to our authentic selves." — Lee Woodruff
"Billed as a book about weddings, this clever novel is just as much about the unspoken truths between friends." — Electric Literature
Kirkus Reviews
2023-03-14
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.
