Sex and Vanity

 Just as I expected, Kevin Kwan's latest novel Sex and Vanity (#928) was the perfect escape for a summer that just won't quit.  And just like his Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, it came complete with snarky footnotes.  New this time were the alma mater lists for each character, from pre-school through grad school.  Ouch! in some cases.

Lucie Churchill is at the center of this novel which begins at an over-the-top weeklong wedding on the Isle of Capri.  Her good friend and former baby-sitter Isabel is marrying into Italian nobility.  Since both families are mega-rich, all the stops are pulled out.   With Lucie a tender nineteen, her mother has insisted her older cousin Charlotte accompany Lucie as a chaperone.  When Adonis-like George Zao and his flamboyant (and ultra-rich!) mother Rosemary enter the picture, things get really interesting.  

Fast forward five years, and when Lucie and George next meet at the Hamptons, she's engaged and he's working as an architect in New York City.  Lucie can't put George out of her mind, but what can she do?  Everything she tries just seems to make matters worse...

Oh, the places, the couture, the fabulous food!  That's what makes reading Kwan's books so much fun.  Personally, I thought Lucie was kind of a wimp who in many ways deserved some of the things that happened to her because she couldn't or wouldn't stand up for herself.  George was too perfect to be true, but don't we all want the total package? - the looks, the smarts, the money...

The descriptions of Capri brought me right back there.  I'm sure the descriptions of NYC and Long Island were spot on, too, but I had to laugh when I read that Lucie's super WASPy Churchill grandmother preferred to spend most of her time in her beach front mansion in Hobe Sound, Florida, in preference to her mansion-sized apartment in NYC, the estate in the Hamptons or the house in Paris.  Not that there aren't plenty of super rich and pretentious people living in Hobe Sound (there are!) but with the exception of a few very modest-sized homes on the ocean between the public Hobe Sound beach and the State Park which occupies the rest of Hobe Sound located on the barrier island, there isn't a mansion in sight.  Now, if Mr. Kwan had just stuck his pin in the map south of Hobe Sound Beach in Jupiter Island, that's the place where the ruling society doyennes will blackball the "wrong kind" by gifting a black cashmere sweater to the new neighbor...  Yep, the rich really are different.  Oh, if only we had that kind of money!