Product Description

The bestselling author of The Devil Wears Prada and Everyone Worth Knowing returns with the story of three best friends who vow to change their entire lives...and change them fast.

Emmy is newly single, and not by choice. She was this close to the ring and the baby she's wanted her whole life when her boyfriend left her for his twenty-three-year-old personal trainer -- whose fees are paid by Emmy. With her plans for the perfect white wedding in the trash, Emmy is now ordering takeout for one. Her friends insist an around-the-world sex-fueled adventure will solve all her problems -- could they be right?

Leigh, a young star in the publishing business, is within striking distance of landing her dream job as senior editor and marrying her dream guy. And to top it all off, she has just purchased her dream apartment. Only when Leigh begins to edit the enfant terrible of the literary world, the brilliant and brooding Jesse Chapman, does she start to notice some cracks in her perfect life...

Adriana is the drop-dead-gorgeous daughter of a famous supermodel. She possesses the kind of feminine wiles made only in Brazil, and she never hesitates to use them. But she's about to turn thirty and -- as her mother keeps reminding her -- she won't have her pick of the men forever. Everyone knows beauty is ephemeral and there's always someone younger and prettier right around the corner. Suddenly she's wondering...does Mother know best?

These three very different girls have been best friends for a decade in the greatest city on earth. As they near thirty, they're looking toward their future...but despite all they've earned -- first-class travel, career promotions, invites to all the right parties, and luxuries small and large -- they're not quite sure they like what they see...

One Saturday night at the Waverly Inn, Adriana and Emmy make a pact: within a single year, each will drastically change her life. Leigh watches from the sidelines, not making any promises, but she'll soon discover she has the most to lose. Their friendship is forever, but everything else is on the table. Three best friends. Two resolutions. One year to pull it off.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16101 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780743290128
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From Publishers Weekly
Lily Rabe throws herself enthusiastically into her narration; she sounds like she's having a ball, and listeners will, too. Rabe especially has fun with over-the-top Brazilian sexpot Adriana, making melodramatic pronouncements and calling everyone querida in a sexy, throaty exotic accent. She's also great as Emmy, the marriage-and-family–obsessed member of the trio: Rabe's sobbing, outraged delivery of Emmy's rant about her boyfriend dumping her for his personal trainer is simultaneously touching and hilarious. Leigh is the straight man of the group, but Rabe's performance conveys her doubts about her engagement realistically and sympathetically. This fun audio brings out the best in the novel. A Simon & Schuster hardcover (Reviews, Apr. 7). (June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author
Lauren Weisberger is the author of The Devil Wears Prada, which spent more than a year on the New York Times hardcover and paperback bestseller lists. The film version, starring Meryl Streep and Anne Hathaway, won a Golden Globe Award and grossed over $300 million worldwide. Her second novel, Everyone Worth Knowing, was also a New York Times bestseller. She lives in New York City with her husband.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Panties is a Vile Word

When Leigh's doorbell rang unexpectedly at nine on a Monday night, she did not think, Gee, I wonder who that could be. She thought, Shit. Go away. Were there people who actually welcomed unannounced visitors when they just stopped by to "say hello" or "check in"? Recluses, probably. Or those friendly Midwestern folks she'd seen depicted in Big Love but had never actually met -- yes, they probably didn't mind. But this! This was an affront. Monday nights were sacred and completely offlimits to the rest of the world, a time of No Human Contact when Leigh could veg out in sweats and watch episode after beautiful TiVo'd episode of Project Runway. It was her only time alone all week, and after some intensive training on her part, her friends, her family, and her boyfriend, Russell, finally abided by it.

The girls had stopped asking for Monday-night plans at the end of the nineties; Russell, who in the beginning of their relationship had openly balked, now quietly contained his resentment (and in football season relished having his own Monday nights free); her mother struggled through one night a week without picking up the phone to call, finally accepting after all these years that she wouldn't hear from Leigh until Tuesday morning no matter how many times she hit Redial. Even Leigh's publisher knew better than to assign her Mondaynight reading...or, god forbid, knew not to log an interrupting phone call. Which is precisely why it was so incredible that her doorbell had just rung -- incredible and panic-inducing.

Figuring it was her super, there to change the air-conditioning filter; or one of the delivery guys from Hot Enchiladas, leaving a menu; or, most likely of all, someone just confusing her door with one of her neighbors', she hit Mute on the TV remote and did not move a muscle. She cocked her head to the side like a Labrador, straining for any confirmation that the intruder had left, but the only thing she heard was the dull, constant thudding from above. Suffering from what her old shrink called "noise sensitivity" and everyone else described as "fucking neurotic," Leigh had, of course, thoroughly scoped out her upstairs neighbor before signing over her life savings: The apartment might have been the most perfect she'd seen in a year and a half of looking, but she hadn't wanted to take any chances.

Leigh had asked Adriana for the scoop on the woman above her, in apartment 17D, but her friend had just pursed her pouty lips and shrugged. No matter that Adriana had lived in the building's full-floor penthouse apartment from the day her parents had moved from São Paulo to New York nearly two decades before; she had completely embraced the New Yorker's I-Promise-Not-to-Acknowledge-You-If-You- Extend-Me-the-Same-Courtesy attitude toward her neighbors and could offer Leigh no info on her neighbor. And so, on a blustery December Saturday right before Christmas, Leigh had slipped the building's doorman twenty bucks, Bond-style, and waited in the lobby, pretending to read a manuscript. After Leigh spent three hours scanning the same anecdote, the doorman coughed loudly and looked at her over the top of his glasses with meaning. Glancing up, Leigh felt an immediate wave of relief. Before her, removing a QVC catalog from an unlocked mailbox, stood an overweight woman in a polka-dot housedress. Not a day younger than eighty, thought Leigh, and she breathed a sigh of relief; there would be no stilettos clacking against the hardwood floors, no late-night parties, no parade of visitors stomping around.

The very next day Leigh wrote a check for the down payment, and two months later she excitedly moved into her mint-condition onebedroom dream apartment. It had a renovated kitchen, an oversized bathtub, and a more than decent northern view of the Empire State Building. It might have been one of the smallest units in the building -- okay, the smallest -- but it was still a dream, a beautiful, lucky dream in a building Leigh never thought she could afford, each and every obscenely priced square foot paid for with her own hard work and savings.

How could she possibly have predicted that the seemingly innocuous upstairs neighbor was a dedicated wearer of massive wooden orthopedic clogs? Still, Leigh berated herself regularly for thinking high heels were the only potential noise risk: it had been an amateur's mistake. Before she'd spotted her neighbor wearing the offending shoes, Leigh had created an elaborate explanation for the relentless upstairs racket. She decided that the woman had to be Dutch (since everyone knew Dutch people wore clogs), and the matriarch of a huge, proudly Dutch family who received constant visits from countless children, grandchildren, nieces, nephews, siblings, cousins, and general advice-seekers...all, most likely, Dutch clog-wearers. After spotting her neighbor wearing an air cast and feigning interest in the woman's disgusting-sounding foot ailments including (but not limited to) plantar fasciitis, ingrown toenails, neuromas, and bunions, Leigh had clucked as sympathetically as she could manage and then raced upstairs to check her copy of the co-op rules. Sure enough, they dictated that owners were required to cover eighty percent of their hardwood floors with carpet -- which she realized was an entirely moot point when the very next page revealed that her upstairs neighbor was president of the board.

Leigh had already endured nearly four months of round-the-clock clogging, something that might have been funny if it was happening to someone else. Her nerves were directly tied to the volume and frequency of the steady thump-thump-thump that segued into a thumpety-thump- thumpety-thump-thump pattern when Leigh's heart began to pound right along with it. She tried to breathe slowly, but her exhales were short and raspy, punctuated by little guppy gasps. As she examined her pale complexion (which on good days she thought of as "ethereal" and all other times accepted as "sickly") in the mirrored hallway closet door, a thin sheen of perspiration dampened her forehead.

It seemed to be happening more frequently, this sweating/breathing issue -- and not just when she heard the wood-on-wood banging. Sometimes Leigh would awaken from a sleep so deep it almost hurt, only to find her heart racing and her sheets drenched. Last week in the middle of an otherwise completely relaxing shavasna -- albeit one where the instructor felt compelled to play an a capella version of "Amazing Grace" over the speakers -- a sharp pain shot through Leigh's chest on each measured inhale. And just this morning as she watched the human tidal wave of commuters cram onto the N train -- she forced herself to take the subway, but hated every second of it -- Leigh's throat constricted and her pulse inexplicably quickened. There seemed to be only two plausible explanations, and although she could be a bit of a hypochondriac, even Leigh didn't think she was a likely candidate for a coronary: It was a panic attack, plain and simple.

In an ineffective attempt to dispel the panic, Leigh pressed her fingertips into her temples and stretched her neck from side to side, neither of which did a damn thing. It felt like her lungs could reach only ten percent capacity, and just as she considered who would find her body -- and when -- she heard a choked sobbing and yet another ring of her doorbell.

She tiptoed over to the door and looked through the peephole but saw only empty hallway. This was exactly how people ended up robbed and raped in New York City -- getting duped by some criminal mastermind into opening their doors. I'm not falling for this, she thought as she stealthily dialed her doorman. Never mind that her building's security rivaled the UN's, or that in eight years of city living she didn't personally know anyone who'd been so much as pickpocketed, or that the chances of a psychopathic murderer choosing her apartment from more than two hundred other units in her building was unlikely....This was how it all started.

The doorman answered after four eternally long rings.

"Gerard, it's Leigh Eisner in 16D. There's someone outside my door. I think they're trying to break in. Can you come up here right away? Should I call 911?" The words came out in a frantic jumble as Leigh paced the small foyer and popped Nicorette squares into her mouth directly from the foil wrapper.

"Miss Eisner, of course I'll send someone up immediately, but perhaps you're mistaking Miss Solomon for someone else? She arrived a few minutes ago and proceeded directly to your apartment...which is permissible for someone on your permanent clearance list."

"Emmy's here?" Leigh asked. She forgot all about her imminent death by disease or homicide and pulled open her door to find Emmy rocking back and forth on the hallway floor, knees pulled tight against her chest, cheeks slick with tears.

"Miss, may I be of further assistance? Shall I still -- "

"Thanks for your help, Gerard. We're fine now," Leigh said, snapping shut her cell phone and shoving it into the kangaroo pocket of her sweatshirt. She dropped to her knees without thinking and wrapped her arms around Emmy.

"Honey, what's wrong?" she crooned, gathering Emmy's teardampened hair from her face into a ponytail. "What happened?"

The show of concern brought with it a fresh stream of tears; Emmy was sobbing so hard her tiny body trembled. Leigh ran through the possibilities of what could cause such pain, and came up with only three: a death in the family, a pending death in the family, or a man.

"Sweetie, is it your parents? Did something happen to them? To Izzie?"

Emmy shook her head.

"Talk to me, Emmy. Is everything okay with Duncan?"

This elicited a wail so plaintive it hurt Leigh to hear it. Bingo.

"Over," Emmy cried, her voice catching in her throat. "It's over for good."

Emmy had made this pronouncement no fewer than eight times in the five years she and Duncan had been dating, but something about tonight seemed different.

"Honey, I'm sure it's all just -- "

"He ...

Customer Reviews

Terrible!
Do not waste your money, time, or effort on this piece of trash. I enjoyed Devil Wears Prada immensely and thought Everyone Worth Knowing was a decent effort as well. But this third novel by Lauren Weisberger had me groaning in agony. The characters are vapid and selfish, the story line thin to non-existent, and the writing is totally disjointed. There were points in the story where I thought I was missing pages in my books because, apparently, Weisberger and her editor forgot the meaning of the word "transition."

I also take issue with the fact that the three main female characters, who are approaching thirty, seem to be more jealous and catty than they are happy and excited when something goes well for one of them. Of course we all feel pangs of jealousy from time to time, but these young women did not one iota of emotional substance keeping them together. Nor did they have any friends besides each other. I guess that makes sense -- Who else would want to spend time with them?! I certainly wouldn't.

There is more I can say but most of it would be a repeat of what the other 1- and 2-star reviewers have already written. I am not even going to bother keeping this book around. I will donate it to a used book shop or the Salvation Army as soon as you can say "This book stinks!"

Boring and empty
This is probably one of the worst books I've ever read. The plot, if you can call it that, went nowhere and the book just dragged on and on and on. I kept hoping it would get better but it never did. The characters were boring and so cliche. The story lacked any kind of depth or emotion and was just filled with superficial material. I've never written a review for a book, but it was so terrible I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.

Hits and misses
Having read so many bad reviews, I was surprised by Chasing Harry Winston. It's actually much better than I expected it to be.

After being dumped by her boyfriend of five years, baby-obsessed Emmy (a restaurateur) decides that she'll sleep with as many random men as possible. Tired of sleeping with many men in succession, ultra-glamorous, Brazilian Adriana decides to enter into a monogamous relationship and possibly get engaged. Leigh, a book editor, is tired of her life, despite a job she loves and a (seemingly) perfect boyfriend. One evening over dinner, two of the three decide to change their lives dramatically within the space of a year.

In Chasing Harry Winston, Weisberger dumps the format she adopted for her first two novels. In some ways, this is good, and gives Weisberger the chance to branch out a bit. This is no outsider-looking-in tale told from a whiney first-person perspective. There's no hellish boss, no glamorous fashion or PR industry. The characters in this novel are surprisingly more unique than those in Weisberger's other two books; with the exception of the perfect boyfriend, I definitely found myself relating to Leigh a little bit. However, the author doesn't seem to be able to create anything new--it seems like this plot has been seen before, most notably in Candace Bushnell's Sex and the City.

The characters, disturbingly, define themselves primarily by their relationships with men; their careers and the other parts of their personal lives repeatedly take backseats to boyfriends and fiancées. Adriana, despite her "tricks" for getting men to chase her, is really the one doing the chasing. It was tough, too, for me to believe the Leigh-Russell relationship. On the other hand, the predicament Leigh finds herself in is very understandable: you find yourself dating the "right" guy, so you feel bad about breaking up with him because you're scared. It's a dilemma I think many women can identify with.

For having reached the age of thirty, these women are very immature and shallow, and overly concerned with having the stress-and-anxiety-free, "perfect" lives that no New York woman I know has. It was also difficult for me to see why these three are friends--they're all so different, but Weisberger never explains to her readers why they were drawn to each other in the first place.

Somewhere in the plot, out of place, is a trip to the Caribbean, during which the girls find themselves in a dicey Curacao airport drinking suspect alcohol bought from a card table, and popping pills. It's pretty much the only funny part of the book. I get the feeling that this is something that really happened to Weisberger or someone she knows, and she felt she just had to put it in. But the scene just didn't belong in this novel.

Although not as funny, clever, or well-written as The Devil Wears Prada, there was much more emotional depth in Chasing Harry Winston than in Everyone Worth Knowing. Keep in mind, though, that Weisberger is pretty much a one-note author.