When a protagonist spends 90 percent of a book making awful choices, the reader can be in for a slog. Yet despite main character Cassie Sunday’s penchant for self-destructive behavior, Lisa Beazley’s winning Keep Me Posted is pure pleasure to read.
During Christmas at their grandparents’ house in Ohio—and over many glasses of wine—Cassie, who lives in Manhattan, and her sister, Sid, who lives in Singapore, bemoan how out of touch they’ve become. Sid eschews social media, and the time difference makes phone calls nearly impossible. The tipsy sisters pledge to spend a year writing each other good old-fashioned letters.
By the time Cassie returns to New York with her husband Leo and their young son, she already has a letter from Sid. Bored and lonely since quitting her job to be a fulltime mom, Cassie throws herself into the letter-writing project. Soon the sisters are divulging their deepest secrets, including Cassie’s drunken kiss with her ex-boyfriend, who is now a rising-star chef, and Sid’s suspicions that her husband is being unfaithful.
Inspired to preserve the letters, Cassie sets up a private blog and scans their letters in. But a glitch in the blog’s system makes all their letters public, and soon #slownewssisters is trending online. Cassie has to decide whether she should tell Leo and let him read about her bad choices, or hope it blows over.
Despite Cassie’s reckless behavior, she is a character with heart and brains, and the rich back-and-forth between the sisters is poignant. Keep Me Posted is a wonderfully modern epistolary novel, in which the letter-writing tradition collides head-on with the perils of technology.
