Product Description

What if your ex was famous and adored by millions? What would you do if you had one chance to make him regret his entire existence? How much would you risk?

Kate Hollis's ex-boyfriend's face plasters newsstands and TV, the Internet, and the multiplex. Jake Sharpe is one of the biggest recording stars on the planet, and every song he's famous for is about Kate. For over a decade his soundtrack has chased her -- from the gym to the supermarket, from the dentist's office to the bars. Now thirty-year-old Kate gets the call that Jake has finally landed back in their Vermont hometown for an MTV special. The moment she has been waiting for has arrived.

On the eve of their prom, Jake Sharpe vanished, resurfacing when his song "Losing" -- about his and Kate's first sexual experience -- shot to the top of the Billboard charts. And the hits kept coming, each more personal than the one before.

Now Kate gets her chance to confront Jake and reclaim her past. But after eleven years of enduring protracted and far-from-private heartbreak, everyone in Kate's life has a stake in how this plays out. Kate must risk betraying the friends Jake abandoned, the bandmates whose songs he plundered, and her own parents, who fear this will dredge up a shared past more painful than any of them want to acknowledge. But after getting the call in the dead of night and jumping on a plane, can she turn back now?

Newsweek dubbed The Nanny Diaries "a national phenomenon" and the New Republic proclaimed, "Thank God for Citizen Girl." Now McLaughlin and Kraus have written a poignant, humorous tale about modern celebrity obsession and coming of age during the divorce boom. With flawless depictions of the 1980s, a charismatic heroine, and their signature biting wit, the authors offer up another lively and hilarious tale of a smart young woman looking for satisfaction in the chaos of contemporary culture.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #369671 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9781416540144
• Condition: USED - LIKE NEW
• Notes:
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
The team behind The Nanny Diaries and Citizen Girl returns with another breezy chick lit portrayal of a woman wronged and, eventually, empowered. When Kate Hollis's childhood chum Laura calls from their Vermont hometown and announces the arrival of Jake Sharpe, a mega rock star and Kate's high school sweetheart, Kate jumps on a plane from Charleston, S.C. (where she's a sustainable development consultant) and makes for idyllic Croton Falls. Through it's been 13 years, Kate still has a primal need to confront not only the boy who abandoned her before the senior prom, but the musical pirate who used her personal life as fodder for his most celebrated songs and cheated his high school bandmates out of deserved recognition and royalties. Chapters switch back and forth between the present and the pivotal middle and high school years where Kate (then Katie) and Jake did the first-love thing: readers get to see Jake's growing he's-just-not-that-into-you-ness and how (surprise!) their Zima-fueled love (it was the '90s) was idealized. While one spends much of the book wanting to shout at Kate to give it up, go back to Charleston and get on with it, McLaughlin and Kraus do get the nagging need for closure in even the shallowest relationships comically right. (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
McLaughlin and Kraus, authors of the popular novel The Nanny Diaries(2002), venture back to the 1980s in their third novel. Kate Hollis fell in love with Jake Sharpe in grade school, dated him in high school, and at 30, has yet to get over him. How can she when Jake, now a rock star with several hit singles to his name, has spent the last 10 years singing about her and about their relationship? When Kate hears that Jake has returned to their hometown with his new fiancee in tow, she jumps on a plane, ready to confront him for exploiting their personal memories in his quest for superstardom. But when Kate sees him again, all her old feelings churn to the surface, and her resolve weakens further when she learns he feels the same. But just as the novel barrels toward what appears to be the most cliched of endings, the authors pull out a surprise and give the reader, and Kate, a completely unexpected and wholly satisfying conclusion. With the movie version of The Nanny Diaries due out this spring, expect considerable interest in the authors' latest outing. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"McLaughlin and Kraus deftly satirize post-feminist, postmodern, twenty-first-century America." -- Booklist

Customer Reviews

Revenge, Forgiveness, or Closure?
If someone you loved had wronged you so intensely that it changed the course of your life, would you seek revenge? Or forgiveness? Or just closure? This is the central theme of writing duo Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus's excellent new novel, Dedication. The pair spin an entirely believable tale about spurned love and anger that burns unabated for thirteen years, and they bring it full circle with an excellent ending.

Katie Hollis first falls "in love" with Jake Sharpe in sixth grade, and their relationship is a series of ups and downs over the course of their school years. Told in chapters that alternate between 2005 and those growing up years, we follow the development of the characters as Jake begins to realize his love of music and Katie's family life falls apart. Then the unthinkable happens: Jake hits the big time, and he leaves Katie and his friends behind, not even recognizing his fellow band mates' contributions on his first hit single and thus denying them any of the significant royalties. When Jake finally returns to his hometown 13 years on, Katie is alerted and, in true hell hath no fury form, she finds herself ready to confront him and "make him regret his entire existence"...or does she? Can she actually let the past go in order to form a future?

This is a page-turner of a novel, with lots of little 80s details thrown in and an enduring love story as the backbone. It will make you question what you would do if facing the same obsession; would you be the bigger person or would you fight back for the life taken from you? And is it all worth it? Definitely a good summer read, and a heart-wrenching one at that. Recommended.

Spectacularly Funny and Smart
I absolutely loved it. It has all the humor and intelligence of the Nanny Diaries and Citizen Girl and deals with a topic everyone can relate to: the desire to be able to go back in time and right the cosmic wrongs of adolescence. While this book could be very funny while staying on that topic, it manages to weave in a very real and complicated family dynamic that adds a deep level of complexity to the book. The book splices from the past to the present and yet never loses the reader who is eagerly awaiting the outcomes of the interconnected plots. I loved it and would highly recommend it!

Stop 2 chapters before the end
The story had so much promise. Like other posters I kept waiting for all the buildup to result in some fabulous ending but there was just this mad downhill rush of stuff at the end that was completely disjointed from the rest of the story and simply didn't ring true. As another person wrote, there was a complete lack of information regarding the characters and the whole thing was extremely superficial. Thank goodness I got this as a gift and didn't have to pay for it.