November 15, 2017
Dunlop (Losing the Light) tells the tale of the culture clash between town and country cousins. At her mother's funeral in Michigan, Laila discovers that she has an entire family of wealthy cousins, aunts, uncles, and grandparents living a glamorous life in New York City. After a failed marriage, Laila moves in with her cousins and is bowled over by their lifestyle of expensive fashions, partying, and summers in the Hamptons. Laila knows some of the family secrets, so her envy of her relatives' easy and sheltered lives and family fortune builds dramatic tension. The wealthy New York family members are enviable in their youth and good looks, although many of them are unsympathetic and shallow, even cruel, using their beauty and power to manipulate others. When the family is torn apart by brutal violence, they find that their money and fame can't shield them from tragedy and loss. VERDICT Readers who follow New York trends will enjoy the stories of fashion, clubs, and restaurants Dunlop builds to a gripping climax while delving into questions of family, loyalty, lust, wealth, power, and betrayal.--Jan Marry, Lanexa, VA
Copyright 2017 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
December 1, 2017
A social-climbing sociopath from Michigan manipulates rich Manhattan relatives--and everyone else--to get what she wants in Dunlop's second novel (Losing the Light, 2015, etc.).Laila is a 23-year-old dental hygienist in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, engaged to marry the dentist she works for. Her father died years earlier, and she doesn't know much about his side of the family. When her mother dies, Laila's paternal cousins show up at the funeral, and she's thrilled to discover that they're wealthy New Yorkers--twins Nora and Leo and their older sister, Liberty. Two years later, divorced from her husband, she moves to New York. She's found a stash of letters to her mother from her paternal grandfather that implies an affair between them, which might explain Laila's parents' banishment to the hinterlands before her birth. Now Laila wants to reconnect with her family, and family money. Slightly dim Nora invites her to stay in her Tribeca penthouse. Laila is happy to be Nora's "Pygmalion-like project," complete with a new wardrobe from Bergdorf Goodman. Former model Liberty, more serious and intellectual and less social than her siblings, finds Laila an internship at the prominent literary agency where she works. Knowing she's beautiful, Laila makes the most of it. She dumps the famous novelist who falls madly in love with her and heads to Mustique with a ruthless British billionaire who sends her packing when she gets drunk with some hippie strangers. Meanwhile she has a series of tawdry sexual encounters with Cameron, Liberty's best friend's brother, who is also carrying on a very proper courtship with Liberty, encounters that don't end after Laila moves in with real estate mogul's son Blake Katz (a too-obvious take on Jared Kushner). For a self-described "skilled chameleon," Laila makes a lot of self-destructive decisions. Dunlop's attempt to combine the tone of Patricia Highsmith with the cast of Sex and the City comes across as rancid, not rakish.
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March 26, 2018
In the uneven latest from Dunlop (Losing the Light), 23-year-old Midwesterner Laila Lawrence, whose father died years ago, is orphaned when her mother, Betsy, dies in a car crash. At the funeral, the sudden appearance of her wealthy paternal New York cousins, twins Nora and Leo, and their older sister, former model Liberty, kicks off a defining and eventually tragic chain of events. Two years after the funeral, the newly divorced Laila is living with Nora and Leo in their adjoining New York penthouses and working as an intern at Liberty’s literary agency. She’s restless and determined to claw her way to the top. Shopping sprees (at Nora’s expense), nightclubs, a disastrous affair with a much older billionaire—Liberty’s would-be love—and more are only the tip of the iceberg for Laila, whose sociopathic tendencies are obvious. The kind-hearted Liberty is the strongest character and stands out among her wealthy peers; the feckless, insipid Nora and the puckish Leo are little more than caricatures. In spite of a certain salacious appeal, Dunlop’s melodramatic novel is a shallow exploration of privilege and bad behavior that doesn’t have much to say.