Reputation

I love the feeling of diving into a book and realizing it is deep in my wheelhouse. Sara Shepard’s books usually hook me in, but her latest one, Reputation, out this December, did me a doozy. Wow, I was hooked. It had everything I love about scandals, affairs, and murder,  and I love the way all the POVs intersected and intertwined. It made sense to me that she originally developed this idea as a TV show, because it 100% seems like the kind of thing I would binge in a day without getting off my couch.

Aldrich University is a nice, elite private school, and that’s where we meet our central characters. There’s Kit, the university president’s daughter, who is married to Greg, a surgeon at the local hospital. There’s also Kit’s sister, Willa, who lives in LA now. Lynn works with Kit and is married to Patrick. Laura works with Greg and is married to a police officer, Ollie. Kit’s daughters, and Greg’s stepdaughters, are Aurora and Sienna, and Sienna is friends with Raina. Convoluted enough for you? Oh, wait until you see how these plots and characters intertwine. There’s affairs of the heart, affairs that just look like affairs, emails from a secret Lolita, baby daddy drama, and it all hits the fan when Aldrich (along with a few other universities) is hacked and the emails are released. Soon, there’s a dead body in the kitchen, a missing murder weapon, and it’s starting to look like everyone has a motive. But who actually committed the crime, and will they get put away for it? And will anyone’s reputation survive the scandal?

WOW this book drew me in. It had more twists and turns that a season of Gossip Girl, and I love the backdrop of an elite college, but focusing mostly on the adults. It had a great blend of personal, family drama with that business drama, adults acting crazy, teens being teens, all that jazz. I loved the way everything got connected and tangled and I kind of figured out who did it, but I still loved following every twist and turn. This book also grasps with the #MeToo in unexpected ways.

There’s no way this doesn’t get made into a mini-series or something, not with how much people love Big Little Lies. I can’t wait.