Rich and Pretty audiobook

I waited a long time to read this book. Books about wealthy women in New York City are not my preferred genre and honestly I avoid them. (This takes effort, there are so many.) But the thing is, I have a very big weakness for well-written contemporary novels and this is definitely that. I read it in one day, breezed right through it like a Sunday brunch.It isn't that I came to like Sarah or Lauren. Sarah in particular is the kind of person I loathe, someone who is so wrapped up in their own privileged life that they are oblivious to the world around them. Sarah is the kind of person who has no job but still considers herself busy and pats herself on the back for all the things she got done. Sarah is awful. And she never becomes not-awful. Reading the book is to constantly be confronted with her awfulness, sometimes to the extent that you know the author is just dangling it in front of you because he can. Lauren is less awful. She has a job, comes from humble beginnings, is more self-aware and aware of the world at large than Sarah. Lauren goes a long way to making the book bearable, and yet she is still the person, who on an Associate Editor's salary, buys a Balenciaga bag.Sarah and Lauren do not get easier or more likable, it's just that Alam is so very good at what he does that I want to spend hours upon hours reading what he says. He is the kind of writer I am instantly jealous of because his book absolutely controls me and yet I have no idea what it is he did to make that happen and as a writer I would really like to know so I can steal his secret.If you are looking for a book to binge on your day off, like I did, it's an excellent choice.

I LOVED IT...until I got to the ending. It's not the popular opinion, but I found this book extremely relatable. I'm in my mid-twenties, and I enjoyed reading dialogue that sounds exactly like conversations my friends and I have had. I really enjoyed the setup of the two main characters - two best friends who have spent 2/3 of their lives together, at the point in a friendship where all of their odd personality quirks are noticed, annoying, but accepted. While both Sarah and Lauren want the absolute best for each other, they can't help but be extremely critical of each other's life choices - from Lauren's lack of steady boyfriend to Sarah's marriage to someone Lauren feels is merely "adequate". Their journey throughout the book was very well written for the characters, but I felt like it was wrapped up too quickly. The ending skips time, and then again, to show where the characters ended up and I felt that wrapping it up with Sarah's wedding/baby shower would have sufficed.

I received the ARC of Rich and Pretty from a friend. Initially, I was dubious I would like a book so diametrically opposed to my very being (not rich, not pretty). However, I was pleasantly surprised. The book details the friendship of Sarah and Lauren, two women in their thirties who live in New York City and have been best friends since adolescence. Rumaan Alam masterfully captures the complexities of female friendship. I enjoy interior novels that explore human interactions, but I suppose that some might find the plot wanting, because the book is more an illustration of a relationship than a novel full of plot twists. I also suspect that some readers might find Sarah and Lauren shallow, and in some ways, they are. Sarah is nominally employed and lives off a trust fund. Her father is a wealthy conservative pundit. She spends most of the novel planning her wedding. I can see how this might grate, but Sarah is ultimately likeable, if a bit prudish. However, I wish Alam had delved a little more into Sarah's character: for instance, we learn a bit about her troubled older brother, but we don't get a lot about the impact the brother had on Sarah's life. Sarah also seems a bit reticent, and though this is part of her character, we don't get to know her in the same way we get to know Lauren, a more fully drawn character. Lauren is proudly single and independent, rejects guys for no good reason other than she is tired of them/doesn't want to settle down, has abortions, is sexually free, etc. I suppose this might also bother folks, but in fact, I loved Lauren. I identified with putting behind a boring life in the suburbs and learning to relate to folks in another socioeconomic class. I did not identify with her beauty, but it helped to set up some of the conflict between Lauren and Sarah (who is apparently not as attractive). The scenes illustrating Lauren studying Sarah's wealthy family to learn their ways were so well done and rang entirely true to me. Also, Lauren's sex scenes were great -- they were realistic and didn't shy away from anything, but were not overblown or false or cutesy. Finally, even though I was initially put off by the title, the scene in which the title is explained is sharp, cruel and cutting. It puts a different spin on what I thought was meant to be breezy and frothy. Overall, Rich and Pretty is a engaging read, though I'd love to see Alam push his characters a step further in terms of emotional engagement.

Why yes, I am still reading books about pre-pandemic nyc so I can feel like my city is fully alive again, if just for a moment

This exceeded my expectations. I thought it would be more plot driven and dramatic. I found myself happy to realize it wasn't because the loose structure made it feel all the more real. It's almost hard to believe Alam isn't a women writing a thinly veiled portrait of her own life. He has a way of perfectly capturing moments in this decades long friendship and adeptly getting under the skin of these two women. His pointed observations about their thought processes, feelings, intentions, and actions reminded me of myself and of other women I've had significant friendships even though I'm not in their socioeconomic strata. I didn't originally like the title but after reaching the brief anecdote that explains it, I can't imagine any other title being more well suited for these characters or this story. What I most appreciate about this novel is the stark difference between Lauren and Sarah, how they drift apart but don't let go of each other. There's no blowup fight or turning point which I think accurately mirrors many real life friendships. While Alam's writing did not have the gross tell tale signs of a man imposing his own idiotic views on femininity onto his female characters, I was keenly aware that this book was not written by a white person. My assumption is that Alam is not a part of the Lauren and Sarah social and economic world but has been adjacent because of his work or educational experiences. The fact that this is written from that point of view made it, in my opinion, all the more richer and nuanced. Come for beautifully written realism about female friendships, stay for the shade against white people and Joan Didion.

I thought it was a very accurate examination of the cycles of friendship that we all go through. There were parts of the book where I genuinely felt that Sarah and Lauren were simply maintaining the friendship out of loyalty or habit, but then there were times (i.e. Sarah's wedding, the birth of Henry) that you could see genuine love and friendship between them. In regards to the look at the friendship, I thought the book was spot on. I have heard other people question what they perceive to be a lack of plot or story line. However, I felt that Lauren's and Sarah's lives were the plot and the story line. It's our everyday ins and outs, comings and goings, arguments and apologies, that make up the stories of our lives. What left me wanting however was the ending of the book. Their story ends in a giant unknown after a huge gap in time between the birth of Henry and the upcoming arrival of Sarah's second son. Maybe I just wanted a happily ever after for Lauren too. In a lot of ways the ending mirrors the way friendships really can be. Long stretches of time apart, but when you see each other again, you can pick up like it was yesterday.

Really well done for what it is - a spot-on observation of female friendship evolution over time and life experience. I simply prefer a bit more plot. Know what you're getting into - I didn't. This is beautifully written character-driven literary. If that's your cup of tea, this book will have you wanting refills. After this, I ordered Diet Coke. :)

Bittersweet portrayal of two friends who are brought together out of obligation and nostalgia, instead of the closeness and inseparableness that used to mark their friendship. This is what happens when hard things remain unspoken, when we do not allow our loved ones to be who they are becoming.

At the risk of sounding as pretentious as many reviewers probably found the two main characters in this book, Rich and Pretty is definitely not a book for everyone, but was certainly a book for me. There are pages and pages dedicated to Sarah's and Lauren's internal monologues about their lives (does this blazer look sophisticated or like I'm trying too much; what exactly is celeriac; who is this person to me and what does that mean for our relationship, etc.)I feel as though I spent several years living inside the skin of both Lauren and Sarah and that Rumaan Alam pretty much nailed what it feels like to be one half of a life-long, complicated female friendship that is painful, exhausting, and also enriching in the ways that it does and doesn't evolve over the years. What makes the book not just readable but actually very much worth-reading is the intelligence and wit sewn into all of that internal monologuing and the dialogue that only sometimes truthfully conveys what the characters are thinking and feeling. I loved how Rumaan would contrast Sarah's and Lauren's views on one aspect of themselves and then use that revelation to inform how we think about the characters. In one section, "Lauren pulls her hair away from her face; it still gets a little wet but it doesn't matter. Her hair looks great, it always does: It's thick, falls in this sublet wave that's natural and not studied, and that some girl in college once told her she was lucky to have and ever since then she's been proud of it." Then a few sections later, "Sarah showers. Her hair is a disaster after the [spin] class so she has to shampoo it, so then she has to blow it dry, because if she doesn't it'll be fine as long as it's wet, but once it no longer is it'll dry into a preposterous tangle that's neither curl not not curl. Her hair must be tamed. So she does that, dries and brushes it into submission. Better."In their next interaction, Sarah wonders if Lauren is jealous of her, knowing she can never breach that topic in a way that's not hurtful or, at least awkward, for Lauren and even if that were the case, there's nothing Sarah could do about it anyway. And yet, we know that it's Lauren who has the natural confidence in her appearance and Sarah who is self-conscious about her looks. Little moments like that are spread through the book and make for a very rewarding reading experience. I especially loved the jump in time towards the end of the book. The majority of the novel takes place over a 9-month period, and then the last section jumps a few years to show us how Lauren and Sarah's friendship has evolved again, over a longer period of time, as their lives diverge even more.

I really loved this book. It was a thoughtful evaluation of a long term friendship as well as life in New York. I had to read it slowly because some part of it hit me pretty hard, but in a good way. This isn't a book about plot so much as a character study of two women growing apart from each other into lives they maybe didn't expect for themselves.

This is the story of a pair of best friends as they navigate through the world of young adulthood. Although very close they have different perspectives on marriage, kids and to some extent men. Sarah is still very close to her family but Lauren is not. They met when they were eleven years old telling each other everything when they were young. Now older, they have drifted apart because of their diverse interests and goals. I feel that this is a very realistic portrayal of upper crust women and well worth reading. Not a very complex plot but well done.