Amy Scribner

FictionComic Fiction

Sex and Vanity

Review by Amy Scribner

The title of bestselling author Kevin Kwan’s blazingly fun new novel is a bit of a misnomer: There’s very little sex. But that’s not what we go to the author of Crazy Rich Asians for, is it? What Kwan consistently delivers—and does so again in Sex and Vanity—are fantastic tales of the over-the-top wealthy, written with just enough empathy to make us care about young, beautiful trust-fund billionaires.

Meet Lucie Tang Churchill. She’s the beautiful daughter of a Mayflower descendant and a Chinese American from Seattle. On her lily-white paternal side, Lucie has always been the outcast. Although she’s a born-and-bred New Yorker, her patrician grandmother still calls her an offensive slang term for a subservient Chinese woman.

When Lucie travels to Italy for the extravagant wedding of a childhood friend, she meets George Zao, a handsome surfer from Hong Kong. Lucie and George get caught in a compromising position at the wedding, and they sheepishly go their separate ways.

Fast-forward five years, and Lucie is a successful art consultant engaged to Cecil Pike, a Texas oil heir and a “GQ-handsome bon vivant.” But Lucie’s family looks down their noses at Cecil’s new money, and Cecil’s family looks right back at Lucie the same way. It’s clear Lucie and Cecil are an odd match—to everyone except Lucie and Cecil. And when George reemerges, Lucie begins to question everything she thought she wanted.

Sex and Vanity is a deliciously fun romp from Capri to Manhattan and East Hampton. Kwan is in fine form, gleefully name-dropping luxury brands and socialites as he spins a heartfelt, satirical tale that observes the price of fame, fortune and following your heart.

What Kevin Kwan consistently delivers—and does so again in Sex and Vanity—are fantastic tales of the over-the-top wealthy, written with just enough empathy to make us care about young, beautiful trust-fund billionaires.

FictionComic Fiction

Last Tang Standing

Review by Amy Scribner

It is a truth universally acknowledged that mothers will meddle in their daughters’ love lives. For Andrea Tang, a successful 33-year-old lawyer in Singapore, that truism extends to her aunties, cousins and anyone else who can claim relation to her. She may have graduated first in her class in law school and now owns her condo despite the sky-high housing prices, but what everyone wants to know is, when will she get married?

After ending a long-term relationship, Andrea feels the pressure to find The One while also putting in as many billable hours as possible to secure a partnership in her prestigious law firm. Her friends offer her their support, from signing her up for Tinder to inviting her to a rich people’s version of book club (i.e., no discernible conversation about the assigned book, lots of champagne and sashimi). At the book club, Andrea meets Eric, an Indonesian hotelier. He’s older, wealthy and quickly makes his move.

But Andrea can’t stop thinking about Suresh, her officemate and competition for law firm partner. He’s annoying, engaged to a beautiful but domineering Londoner and not at all Andrea’s type. Except that he’s exactly her type. When Eric wants to take their relationship to the next level, Andrea has to decide whether a future of wealth and comfort wins over listening to her heart.

Author Lauren Ho is a former legal adviser, and her debut novel is a blast. Andrea is a relatable, laugh-out-loud protagonist, a high achiever who also gives in to her weaker instincts on occasion. Last Tang Standing is a near-perfect blend of Crazy Rich Asians and Bridget Jones’s Diary, yet it still feels wholly original.

 

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this review incorrectly stated that Lauren Ho is a former attorney.

Author Lauren Ho is a former attorney, and her debut novel is a blast. Andrea is a relatable, laugh-out-loud protagonist, a high achiever who also gives in to her weaker instincts on occasion. Last Tang Standing is a near-perfect blend of Crazy Rich Asians and Bridget Jones’s Diary, yet it still feels wholly original.

FictionLiterary Fiction

Redhead by the Side of the Road

Review by Amy Scribner

Micah Mortimer is a single, middle-aged man whose life is governed by routine. On Mondays, he mops his floors. Fridays are for vacuuming. He runs every morning. He lives alone, managing an apartment building. And he finds most people perplexing. “Sometimes when he was dealing with people, he felt like he was operating one of those claw machines on a boardwalk, those shovel things where you tried to scoop up a prize but the controls were too unwieldy and you worked at too great a remove.”

Micah’s carefully calibrated world is upended when he returns from his morning run to find a teenage boy named Brink on his stoop. Brink is the son of Micah’s college girlfriend, and he is convinced Micah is his father. They quickly determine the math makes that scenario impossible, but Brink lingers. He’s gotten into some trouble in college and is reluctant to go home and face his parents. Brink’s presence triggers a chain of events that threaten not only Micah’s daily routine but also his entire carefully structured life. Soon he finds himself rethinking his place in the world.

Not a word is wasted in this slim, beautiful novel. Reading Anne Tyler is always pure pleasure, and Redhead by the Side of the Road is the author at her best. This joyful book is a powerful reminder of how much we need human connection.

Not a word is wasted in this slim, beautiful novel. Reading Anne Tyler is always pure pleasure, and Redhead by the Side of the Road is the author at her best.
NonfictionHumorEssays

Wow, No Thank You.

Review by Amy Scribner

The ability to write 240 witty characters on social media does not necessarily translate to being someone whose books you want to read. But that’s what happened with Samantha Irby, whom I first knew as the person consistently killing it on Twitter, making me laugh out loud with her tweets on “Judge Mathis” and “Succession.” (She’s obsessed with both.)

It was later that I realized she also writes stunningly astute, hilarious essays about topics both serious (becoming a stepmother) and less so (her slightly lazy beauty rituals). But like all the best essayists, Irby brings deeper insights to even her most lighthearted work.

In “Girls Gone Mild,” Irby reflects on her extreme reluctance to go out, now that she’s rounding the corner to 40: “Remember when you could be roused from a night being spent on the couch in your pajamas, curled around a pint of Chubby Hubby, and goaded into joining your friends at the bar even though you’d already taken off your bra? Yeah, I can’t either, but I know those days existed. I have the liver damage to prove it.” By the end of the essay, Irby has made peace with her new slower pace of life. It’s simultaneously funny and poignant, as are all the entries in this unflinching collection. 

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Samantha Irby discusses moving to Kalamazoo, Michigan, working in Hollywood and writing her newest book, Wow, No Thank You.

Perhaps the most powerful is “Body Negativity,” in which Irby catalogs the many ways women are expected to perform upkeep on our appearances so we have glowing skin, flowing eyelashes, smooth foreheads and snow-white teeth. But guess what? Irby has discovered that, unless it makes you feel good, none of that really matters: “I have threaded, I have microbladed, I have trimmed, I have tinted, I have filled in, I have styled, I have contoured, and I have microfeathered my stupid eyebrows, and none of those things has ever had a discernible impact on my life. Now I do nothing, and it’s fine!”

Frankly, Irby’s radically honest writing in Wow, No Thank You. makes me feel better—or at least less bad—about myself. She gives a welcome voice to what so many women in 2020 are feeling: overleveraged, underappreciated, exhausted, bloated—but hopeful. 

The ability to write 240 witty characters on social media does not necessarily translate to being someone whose books you want to read. But that’s what happened with Samantha Irby, whom I first knew as the person consistently killing it on Twitter, making me laugh…

FictionHistorical Fiction

The Lost Diary of M

Review by Amy Scribner

She appears in pop culture occasionally—in movies, TV and podcasts. But for the most part, Mary Pinchot Meyer has been lost to history.

Remembered mainly as John F. Kennedy’s longtime lover and confidant, Meyer was more than just a mistress. She was an accomplished painter. She experimented with LSD with Timothy Leary. She was a popular socialite in the 1960s Georgetown scene, into which she was introduced by her ex-husband, a CIA senior leader. A free spirit, Meyer unapologetically embraced the sexual revolution.

Less than a year after JFK’s assassination, Meyer was shot to death while on her daily walk along the Washington, D.C., waterfront. Her murder was never solved, and rumors swirled about whether her affair and her outspoken advocacy for psychedelic drugs placed her on the wrong side of power.

In his memoir, legendary Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee—who was Meyer’s brother-in-law—alludes to a secret diary she may have left behind. This trippy, intriguing novel imagines what this long-rumored diary might contain. DC luminaries like Katharine Graham and Joe Alsop drift into the pages as Meyer describes the boozy parties that gave shape to her days: “Many things transpire at parties in Georgetown. Cases of hard liquor flow without end. Assignations occur secretly in walk-in closets and pantries. An Amazon River of gossip, rumor, truth, and untruth flows through the conversations of men who run the government, men who spy, men who scribble opinions in newsprint, and all the women who accompany them, like mothers overseeing an alcoholic playground.”

Written in spare, foreboding entries, The Lost Diary of M takes a fresh look at a woman whose mysterious death will likely never be solved. Author Paul Wolfe takes great care with his subject, painting a nuanced, never sensationalized picture of a complex woman.

Written in spare, foreboding entries, The Lost Diary of M takes a fresh look at a woman whose mysterious death will likely never be solved. Author Paul Wolfe takes great care with his subject, painting a nuanced, never sensationalized picture of a complex woman.

FictionFamily Saga

House of Trelawney

Review by Amy Scribner

The Trelawney estate in Cornwall is much like the Trelawney family itself: sprawling, ancient and crumbling. Once among the most breathtaking estates in Britain, it has fallen into disrepair as the Trelawney fortune disappears. Ivy and moss grow through the walls of what were once grand ballrooms. Greenhouses around the property lie in collapsed heaps. Most of the formerly extensive art collection has been sold off, leaving shameful empty patches on the castle walls. As author Hannah Rothschild writes, “As the centuries tripped by, the Earls of Trelawney, their senses and ambition dulled by years of pampered living, failed to develop other skills. Of the twenty-four earls, the last eight had been dissolute and bereft of any business acumen. Their financial ineptitude, along with two world wars, the Wall Street crash, three divorces and inheritance taxes, had dissipated the family’s fortune.” 

As has been the tradition for centuries, Kitto promptly kicks his sister, Blaze, out of the castle when he is named the 24th Earl of Trelawney. The hapless Kitto, who is virtually devoid of employable skills or interests, lives in the castle with his wife, Jane, whose own sizable inheritance has been sunk into the lost cause of maintaining Trelawney. 

Blaze, sent packing with little cash and no plan, has remade herself as an uber-successful financial investor in London. Beautiful, ruthless and utterly lonely, Blaze hasn’t spoken to the family in years. But when an unexpected heir turns up, the family is forced to reengage and find a way to save the house of Trelawney.

Rothschild, author of The Improbability of Love and The Baroness: The Search for Nica, the Rebellious Rothschild, is also an accomplished film director and a member of that Rothschild clan (the banking one). Her understanding of the eccentric world of English aristocrats shines throughout this remarkably entertaining novel. Her writing is whimsical yet poignant as she examines how privilege can become a burden, and how an inheritance system so focused on men impacts the women drawn into it. Consider an elderly male relative who marvels at the survival instincts of a young Trelawney woman who is single-mindedly focused on marrying someone wealthy: “He’d never understood women; men were so simple by comparison. Centuries of absolute power had dulled the male brain, whereas women, forced for so long to cajole and manipulate, had evolved into far more complex and capable beings.”

Part comedy of manners, part serious meditation on money and gender roles, House of Trelawney is both deeply thought-provoking and thoroughly fun. 

Part comedy of manners, part serious meditation on money and gender roles, House of Trelawney is both deeply thought-provoking and thoroughly fun. 

NonfictionBiography

You Never Forget Your First

Review by Amy Scribner

He is singular among American heroes: Founding Father, truth-teller, brave but reluctant military leader. In the insightful and entertaining You Never Forget Your First, historian Alexis Coe moves past the well-worn tropes we’ve come to associate with George Washington. Her nuanced portrait paints a man torn between service to country and family.

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read a Q&A with Alexis Coe.

Born to Augustine and Mary Washington on a modest farm in Fredericksburg, Virginia, George was the oldest of six. Augustine died when George was just 11 years old. With a modest inheritance and no money for education, George learned responsibility at an early age. At 17, he became the surveyor of Culpeper County, the youngest ever, and began buying land. A natural leader, he became a major in the Virginia military by 21 and caught the eye of British Governor Dinwiddie, who sent him on a mission to expel French settlers from the Ohio territory. These were his earliest forays into what would become a lifetime of public service. 

Washington’s story is as well documented as anyone’s in American history. Yet Coe, a former research curator for the New York Public Library, finds fresh angles from which to examine him. And she doesn’t shy away from the most troubling aspect of Washington’s legacy: When he died, he owned 123 slaves. The museum at Mount Vernon claims Washington freed all the people he enslaved in his 1799 will. While that is technically true, Coe points out that their emancipation was not automatic upon his death. Even worse, many of the people enslaved by Washington had married those enslaved by Martha, so even when they were emancipated, their loved ones were not.

Despite the heavy subject matter, Coe writes with style and humor (one chapter opens with the line “Great love stories don’t often begin with dysentery”). You Never Forget Your First reminds us of the importance of public service and diplomacy, and Coe makes colonial history not just fascinating but relevant.

In the insightful and entertaining You Never Forget Your First, historian Alexis Coe moves past the well-worn tropes we’ve come to associate with George Washington.
NonfictionSelf-Help

Kill Reply All

Review by Amy Scribner

Be honest: Have you ever been guilty of phubbing? Have you ever been Tindstagrammed? Do you often show off your #ootd?

Now really be honest: Do you know what any of those things are? Because I sure didn’t before reading Kill Reply All, a clever and informative guide to online etiquette by Victoria Turk, a senior editor at Wired magazine. (For the record, “phubbing” is snubbing someone in favor of your phone, “Tindstagramming” is stalking someone on Instagram after they rejected you on Tinder, and “#ootd” is a tag used when you post a picture of your outfit of the day.)

Living in the digital age is confusing. By now, most of us know the subtext of the eggplant emoji and understand that using punctuation in our texts is a sure sign we’re old. Still, navigating the online world is complicated. To make things simpler, Turk divides her practical and straightforward advice into four categories: work, romance, friendship and community. Turk’s Marie Kondo-like approach to email inbox management may actually make you excited to tackle those 1,500 unread messages.

The section on online romance—from choosing a photo for your dating app profile to avoiding “some of the invasive species that have made online dating their habitat”—is fairly specific. Not everyone needs a tutorial on online flirting, but for those who do, Turk’s hilarious pointers on what your dating bio really says about you are not to be missed. (When someone is “adventurous,” it means they “did a gap year.”)

Probably the most useful section is the chapter on how to behave in different online communities. The rules vary, and so will your persona. (Think of how you present yourself on Twitter versus LinkedIn.) This chapter offers ample food for thought on how to artfully unfriend someone on Facebook, when it’s appropriate to tag someone on Twitter and how to make a meme. 

At the end of the day, we all fall prey to online pitfalls. The trick is to use your best judgment, use emojis sparingly and, for the love of God, don’t accidentally like a photo when you’re stalking your ex-boyfriend’s Facebook page.

Be honest: Have you ever been guilty of phubbing? Have you ever been Tindstagrammed? Do you often show off your #ootd? Now really be honest: Do you know what any of those things are? You will after reading this clever and informative guide to online etiquette.
FictionThriller

A Good Man

Review by Amy Scribner

Much has been discussed in recent years about what it means to be a man in modern America: the belief that men should be masculine yet tender, chivalrous yet feminist, strong yet vulnerable. In the chillingly good A Good Man, debut novelist Ani Katz examines what happens when the weight of expectations comes crashing down on one family. 

Thomas Martin was raised in the nightmarish tangle of an abusive home, where his father took out his disappointment on his children. After his father dies, Thomas becomes the man of the house, working his way through college and up the corporate ladder. He provides for his mother and younger sisters, who still live together in semi-squalor because they don’t know any other way.

Thomas is wary of bringing Miriam, the beautiful Parisian woman he plans to marry, to his family home, where she “would notice the skid marks of dried grease around the rims of the plates, the crusty residue at the bottom of our tumblers.” It’s as if every grubby object reflects upon him and his shame-filled childhood.

When it comes time to make his own family, Thomas is determined to attain perfection and nothing less. “We were two of a kind, my wife and I,” he says. “If my life up to that point had been like an old and battered house, she wanted to rip the rot from the rooms, banish the bad memories, throw open the windows, and fill the place with light and air and the breath of the future.” 

They buy a Dutch colonial home outside Manhattan and have a daughter. Thomas makes more money and drives his daughter to private school in a Mercedes S-Class sedan. Miriam struggles with postpartum depression and suburban isolation, but they work through it.

Everything is perfect—and yet. His relationship with Miriam is fraying. Their daughter is filled with the ennui of a typical preteen. When Thomas makes a catastrophically bad decision at work, he finds everything he’s worked for evaporating around him.

This is when A Good Man—infused with a low-grade dread from the very first page—takes a seriously sinister turn. The full impact of Thomas’ childhood trauma comes into focus as he retraces how things went so wrong and admits he may not be the most reliable narrator. 

Katz has delivered a whip-smart, beautifully written meditation on marriage, masculinity and the thin line between happiness and disaster.

Ani Katz has delivered a whip-smart, beautifully written meditation on marriage, masculinity and the thin line between happiness and disaster.
NonfictionMemoirFood & Drink

The Book of Eating

Review by Amy Scribner

In The Book of Eating, longtime New York magazine restaurant critic Adam Platt offers a delicious peek behind the scenes of a storied career.

A diplomat’s son who grew up eating the best dumplings, ramen and dim sum Asia had to offer, Platt clearly loves food. But unlike his famous peers, such as Ruth Reichl, A.J. Liebling and Craig Claiborne, Platt doesn’t take too seriously his role as one of the “serious restaurant critics . . . still operating under the ancient, slightly tattered Kabuki rituals of the trade, with our ironic faux reservation names, our dwindling expense accounts, and our discreet though mostly useless disguises.”

He knows he has the rare luck of being a professional eater, and his love for and slight amazement at his job come across in this riot of a book.

While much of The Book of Eating focuses on Platt’s decades at the magazine, the most mouth-watering chapters focus on his childhood living in Hong Kong and Taiwan. He and his brothers were raised on traditional Asian meals, which he recalls all these years later with delightful clarity: “Communal beef and lamb barbecue buffet tossed with scallions and different sauces by the cooks on a giant, curving, charcoal-heated brazier and then served, with messy ceremony, between fresh-baked sesame seed buns.”

Platt dishes a genteel helping of gossip about the New York restaurant scene, where chefs and restaurant owners are not afraid to speak their minds. The “mercurial king of the New York brasserie, Keith McNally,” did not take kindly to a mediocre review of his new pizzeria, writing in an open letter that Platt was bald, overweight and out-of-touch. (Though it should be noted this was mild compared to what Mario Batali said about Platt, which cannot be repeated here but is the colorful name of a very funny chapter in the book.)

Platt’s greatest insights come when he ponders the evolving role of the restaurant critic. He writes that, “after the social media meteor obliterated the old ways of doing almost everything, those of us who’d managed, by some divine miracle, to survive the waves of magazine shutterings and print media layoffs, not to mention the clickbait food crazes that seemed to sweep over the landscape like biblical plagues every week, were adapting to our new environment the best we could.”

Restaurant critics may have to compete these days with top 10 listicles and filtered Instagram photos of your cousin’s brunch, but Platt delivers a generous, hilarious case for the restaurant critic’s enduring significance.

In The Book of Eating, longtime New York magazine restaurant critic Adam Platt offers a delicious peek behind the scenes of a storied career.

A diplomat’s son who grew up eating the best dumplings, ramen and dim sum Asia had to offer, Platt clearly loves…

NonfictionEssays

For Small Creatures Such as We

Review by Amy Scribner

“My parents taught me that the universe is enormous and we humans are tiny beings who get to live on an out-of-the-way planet for the blink of an eye,” writes author Sasha Sagan in the introduction of For Small Creatures Such as We, a gorgeous collection of essays that reads like a memoir. 

The daughter of two of the 20th century’s most important contributors—astronomer Carl Sagan and producer Ann Druyan—Sagan began thinking deeply about the traditions and passages that shape life on earth after becoming a mother herself. Birth, anniversaries, fasting, atonement: She approaches these subjects with wonderment and a generous window into her extraordinary family history. A secular Jew who was raised by her famous parents to be an independent and deep thinker, Sagan demonstrates that rituals aren’t reserved purely for the religious.

“There is so much change in this world,” she writes. “So many entrances and exits and ways to mark them, each one astonishing in its own way. Even if we don’t see birth or life as a miracle in the theological sense, it’s still breathtakingly worthy of celebration.”

Sagan writes with stunning clarity and absolute joy. In the chapter on coming of age, Sagan connects puberty with the myth of the werewolf, before galloping through the rites of passage observed by the Amish, Mormons, Apaches, Japanese and her own family. When Sagan got her first period at age 13, her mother “took me in her arms and made me feel this was cause for celebration.” Contrast this with her mother’s experience as a Jew: Druyan’s mother slapped her across the face, as was the inexplicable custom in that time. 

For Small Creatures Such as We is a marvel. It dazzles and comforts while making us consider our own place in the vast universe. As Sagan writes, “We are, after all, someone’s distant future and someone else’s ancient past.”

“My parents taught me that the universe is enormous and we humans are tiny beings who get to live on an out-of-the-way planet for the blink of an eye,” writes author Sasha Sagan in the introduction of For Small Creatures Such as We, a gorgeous…

FictionThriller

Sarah Jane

Review by Amy Scribner

Sarah Jane Pullman has lived a hardscrabble life. Her mom disappeared at regular intervals throughout her childhood. Her tour of duty in the Middle East ended with an RPG that killed her patrol partner right in front of her. She has cooked at every out-of-the-way diner in the tri-state area and fled an abusive marriage. But Sarah Jane has a knack for taking life as it comes.

“Lives rarely go into the oven as goo and come out beautifully golden,” she says.

Author James Sallis has delivered a long list of excellent crime novels, as well as biographies and books of poetry. With its spare but insightful prose and probing exploration of the price of our sins, Sarah Jane fits among his finest.

The titular character has settled down as a small-town cop, managing the fender benders, bar fights and neighborhood quarrels that pass for crime in a sleepy Middle America town. She regularly sees a man she likes just fine, and although she tends to keep to herself, she has a handful of friends and many more admirers of her low-key approach to the law.

Sallis imbues his story with an astonishingly real sense of place, settling Sarah Jane in a town that is “the kind of place that has period gingerbread houses shouldered up against modern cookie-cutters, where hardware stores and gas-and-live-bait shops cling to town’s edge, where you hear the whisper of old-country vowels in local speech.”

When an unusually violent crime shakes the town, it soon becomes clear Sarah Jane’s long-ago choices have caught up with her. Her intense need for privacy rubs up against the community’s need for answers. Sarah Jane finds herself thinking about her “patchwork past” and how it has led her to a place she can call home. This book will leave you marveling about our ability to carve out a life, no matter how different it is from what we expected.

As Sarah Jane learns, “However hard you stare at maps and plan, you rarely get where you think you’re going.”

Sarah Jane Pullman has lived a hardscrabble life. Her mom disappeared at regular intervals throughout her childhood. Her tour of duty in the Middle East ended with an RPG that killed her patrol partner right in front of her. She has cooked at every out-of-the-way…

NonfictionSelf-HelpFamily & Relationships

Fair Play

Review by Amy Scribner

Eve Rodsky makes the bold assertion that she’s “changing society one marriage at a time.” Is she a renowned family therapist? A world-famous researcher into the dynamics of marriage? No. She’s a Harvard-educated lawyer and mom of three who got sick and tired of nagging her husband to pitch in around the house.

Rodsky talked to hundreds of couples to get to the heart of why, in 2019, women still bear the brunt of invisible work—things like scheduling teacher conferences and providing middle-of-the-night comfort to kids. And then some women fall into the trap of nagging and criticizing their partners for not doing things exactly as they would. It’s a no-win situation for everyone involved.

“We expect women to work like they don’t have children and raise children as if they don’t work,” Rodsky writes. She would know. After a stint at J.P. Morgan, Rodsky launched her own business advising charitable foundations, all while bringing three humans into the world. She writes lovingly of her husband, Seth, who “made efforts to extend a hand, but ultimately retreated because ‘I can’t do anything right.’ ” It was in an effort to preserve her own marriage that Rodsky did the research for and designed the Fair Play system.

It’s to Rodsky’s credit that Fair Play: A Game-Changing Solution for When You Have Too Much to Do (and More Life to Live) never devolves into a diatribe against men. (Although some of the quotations she gets from men in her interviews are astonishingly retro: “What does she have to complain about? I have the stress of putting the food on the table.”) She takes a solution-based approach to the issue, starting from the premise that men’s and women’s time are of equal worth, no matter who makes more money or stays home with the kids. From there, couples are given the tools to renegotiate the top 100 things required to make a household work—everything from managing pets to ensuring first aid and emergency supplies are in order.

Fair Play is lively and cathartic, and just plain fun to read. Rodsky acknowledges the issues that chip away at so many marriages and offers a completely achievable approach to solving them. Her message is clear: Stop nagging, start living.

Eve Rodsky makes the bold assertion that she’s “changing society one marriage at a time.” Is she a renowned family therapist? A world-famous researcher into the dynamics of marriage? No. She’s a Harvard-educated lawyer and mom of three who got sick and tired of nagging…

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