He introduced her to his friends, a big group of townies who had all grown up in Greenhead and gone to high school together, who seemed to spend every weekend finding different ways to get drunk and wild in a town with only two bars. Caroline found their clique slightly impenetrable – they were older than her, most of them married with kids, but they drank like college students on spring break and communicated in private jokes and quotes and had strong opinions about sports Caroline couldn’t follow.The three women who have been besties since childhood, Bailey, Augusta, and Fran, do not exactly intend to be unpleasant but they see her as a temporary blip on their existence. Caroline can put up with them so long as Van likes her – and he does, even when he has to bring her startling news: that he and Bailey used to date and still slept with each other occasionally until he met Caroline, and now Bailey is pregnant and planning to keep the baby. Caroline thinks she’s in love with Van but this would be hard for anyone to accept (I’m looking at you, Gisele Bundchen). And while this reader was amused by the antics of Van and his friends, I did not identify with them and was much more sympathetic to Caroline - at least, for most of the book.
I enjoyed Jackson’s first book, Pineapple Street, about a young woman from Rhode Island who marries a preppy guy whose family condescends to and sometimes torments her, while he is mostly oblivious. It got a lot of publicity because the author is a prominent editor at Knopf and became a surprise bestseller. I also appreciate that the author is from Massachusetts' North Shore herself, although she lives in Brooklyn now, so she grasps the Boston-New York rivalry:
Fran had watched countless baseball games growing up, raised on the rivalry between the Red Sox and the Yankees. She was astonished as an adult to visit New York and see people wearing Red Sox hats on the street, everyone minding their own business and letting them just carry on. If you wore a Yankees hat anywhere in Greenhead you’d be harassed until you pulled it off your head, people around Boston hated that Yankees that much.I don’t remember any unpleasantness when I was a Red Sox fan living in NYC (other than disliking the Yankees and disappointment prior to 2004) but I don’t wear a baseball cap and I am not sure I owned a tee shirt at that time, so maybe no one could tell my true allegiance! I do remember my first trip to Yankee Stadium, not being able to find my seat, and asking an employee if he were an usher. “Lady, we don’t have ushers here, only bouncers!” he said, with a glare. On the other hand, several years ago I had an intern from a local college who offended me by wearing jeans and a Yankees hat. I explained to him that the jeans and the hat were not suitable work attire, and tried to make a joke out of it by saying, “Even a Red Sox hat would not be appropriate to wear inside.”
What *is* the Shampoo Effect? According to Goodreads, the author uses the physical hair-washing phenomenon as a metaphor for a tight-knit community or group of longtime friends. Just like a second wash strips away hidden dirt to work things "into a lather," an outside disruption exposes buried secrets, shakes up a tight circle, and forces hidden layers of a town to the surface. Caroline is the outsider who comes and shakes up the group, whether they like it or not, but it seems to me she is damaged by this as much as they are. I didn't like this as much as Jackson's first book but it was certainly amusing.
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| The Hammond Castle Museum |
Author: Jenny Jackson
Publication: Pamela Dorman/Viking, hardcover, 2026
Genre: Fiction
Source: Library
Image copyright: https://www.seacoastkidscalendar.com/hammond-castle-museum/
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