She moved to extricate herself from an affair!
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*****
Eliza Hunt is the woman who created the Hudson Valley Ladies’ Bulletin Board fifteen years before the story opens. It is a large online parenting and marriage forum whose popularity is now being threatened by a new group for younger women. Supposedly the new site, Valley Girls, offers “more dirty laundry, less how best to wash it.”
Not wanting these “millennial mommas” to make her site obsolete, Eliza writes a fictitious post for her Bulletin Board that is as titillating as the ones she finds when she checks out the Valley Girls site. And like those posts, she submits it anonymously. Hoping to create an “epic thread,” she writes about a woman who just moved to town in part to extricate herself from an extra marital affair. The only problem is, her lover has followed her to the new city. Suffice it to say, this juicy post garners a lot of comments on the Bulletin Board.
Eliza is one of four main women in the book. We also meet Amanda Cole, Eliza’s childhood friend, who has returned to town due to the breakup of her marriage. She fled Hollywood when her famous husband got caught up – or perhaps with his pants down – in the #MeToo movement. Then we meet two women who are new to town (uh-oh…new to town?) First there is Olivia York who is a new mom adjusting to parenthood, a new town, and to a husband who is often not home because he is running late. Finally, we meet Alison Le, a Harvard grad and a high-powered attorney from New York. She got pregnant accidentally, was not surprised when the father of her child declined to be involved, and set out to have and raise the child on her own. She intended to do all this in New York with the help of a nanny, but then she couldn’t imagine leaving her child with that nanny. Next thing you know, she is moving to the Hudson Valley.
Clearly there are many important issues to discuss in this book, but I have left one out. Eliza is agoraphobic. It is apparent that Eliza knows what triggered her condition, but she has told no one, not even Amanda. All we know is Eliza spent four months unable to leave home as a teenager, and now she is immobilized again.
In spite of these heavy topics, this book is a lighthearted, fun, and funny novel and the characters are all likable. It’s great to watch them in action as they became friends and arrive on the scene to help each other. I rooted for each of them throughout the book and have my fingers crossed for happily ever after.
*****
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