The Smart One

With her best-selling debut, Girls in White Dresses (An €œirresistible, pitch-perfect first novel€ €"Marie Claire), Jennifer Close captured friendship in those what-on-earth-am-I-going-to-do-with-my-life years of early adulthood. Now, with her sparkling new novel of parenthood and sibling rivalry, Close turns her gimlet eye to the only thing messier than friendship: family.

Weezy Coffey€s parents had always told her she was the smart one, while her sister was the pretty one. €œMaureen will marry well,€ their mother said, but instead it was Weezy who married well, to a kind man and good father. Weezy often wonders if she did this on purpose€"thwarting expectations just to prove her parents wrong.

But now that Weezy€s own children are adults, they haven€t exactly been meeting her expectations either. Her oldest child, Martha, is thirty and living in her childhood bedroom after a spectacular career flameout. Martha now works at J.Crew, folding pants with whales embroidered on them and complaining bitterly about it. Weezy€s middle child, Claire, has broken up with her fianc©, canceled her wedding, and locked herself in her New York apartment€"leaving Weezy to deal with the caterer and florist. And her youngest, Max, is dating a college classmate named Cleo, a girl so beautiful and confident she wears her swimsuit to family dinner, leaving other members of the Coffey household blushing and stammering into their plates.

As the Coffey children€s various missteps drive them back to their childhood home, Weezy suddenly finds her empty nest crowded and her children in full-scale regression. Martha is moping like a teenager, Claire is stumbling home drunk in the wee hours, and Max and Cleo are skulking around the basement, guarding a secret of their own. With radiant style and a generous spirit, The Smart One is a story about the ways in which we never really grow up, and the place where we return when things go drastically awry: home.