Book Smart Kate

Book: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Audiobook: 🌟🌟🌟🌟 Spice: 🌶️

by Jessica Saunders

This delightful new book is equal parts a story of a marriage in crisis and a story of a second chance with your first love. 

Rachel is a lawyer on the fast track, married to her law school boyfriend, and living in a swanky suburban NYC neighborhood with their two kids. Life isn’t perfect, but nothing ever is. She works long hours and takes on most of the parenting load. The PTA is filled with gossipy moms, and sometimes she feels like she has lost a bit of herself, but that’s just life. Then, one day, she turns on her phone to find hundreds of alerts as photos and love letters between her and her ex-boyfriend splash across every gossip site. Why? Because her high school boyfriend and first love, Jack Bellow, is now the famous actor. As her past is displayed to the world, Rachel’s marriage, job, friendships, and family are tested. And then Jack returns to her orbit along with a lot of “what-ifs” about her past, present and future.

Written in a dual timeline, we bounce between Rachel’s present and how she met and fell in love with Jack, her first love, and Dan, her husband. What could have easily been written with stereotyped characters was refreshingly rounded out with complex, deep, flawed but sympathetic characters. This book is about realizing what you want for yourself and your family and not accepting less than you deserve from the people in your life. It also ponders if you ever really get over your first love. It was also a really fun throwback to memories of passing tightly folded notes in high school. Just like Rachel, mine live in a box in our basement.

The audiobook was very fun and it was a quick listen!