03/15/2021
Sweeney’s disappointing latest (after The Nest ) revolves around two New York City theater transplants and their daughter and friends in Los Angeles. When musical theater–turned–voiceover actor Flora Mancini discovers her husband Julian Fletcher’s wedding ring in their garage, she suspects something is awry: he had told her he lost it swimming in a pond. A meandering set of backstories and present-day happenings ensues, involving the couple’s 18-year-old daughter, Ruby, and their best friends: Margot Letta, an actor on a television drama, and her husband, David Pearlman, a former cardiac surgeon whose practice was upended when he had a stroke. In chapters alternating between the characters’ points of view, Sweeney unravels the love, pain, and disappointment between them as Flora seeks to discover why Julian lied about the wedding ring, Margot’s TV role comes to a close and she reckons with her part in the ring mystery, and Ruby travels to Spain with a boyfriend before starting college. While the deliciously flawed characters are well developed, the lackluster climax and drawn-out therapy scenes involving Flora and Julian are less successful. In the end, readers will long for more drama in a story of people whose lives are steeped in it. Agent: Henry Dunow, Dunow, Carlson & Lerner Literary Agency. (May)
"With candor and humor, Good Company tackles big issues—the reckoning between artistic ambition and family life, the strange tension between honesty and loyalty, the way time’s inevitable passage affects friendships and romance and our sense of self. Once again, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney has written a book you’ll stay up all night reading."
"This book is SMART. It breathes new life into topics such as love, marriage, parenting, friendship and that old chestnut, betrayal. Set in both an erudite theater-world Manhattan and a golden-hued Hollywood, Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney hits a bullseye with every single scene. Good Company is brilliant company."
You don't need to be a fan of Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's bestseller The Nest to appreciate the high stakes, sly class commentary, and masterful storytelling of Good Company —but it wouldn't hurt.
"There are few writers who explore the depths of family and friendship with as much care and nuance as Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney, whose new novel is a generous, empathetic portrayal of a marriage and friendship thrown into disarray by an accidental discovery. . . . D'Aprix Sweeney interrogates all that goes into building a life together — the messiness, the heartache, and the joy."
Masterfully building character…and dropping revelations through flashbacks, D’Aprix Sweeney’s writing is smooth and propelling. Readers of introspective, relational novels will devour this.
From the bestselling author of The Nest comes another charming yet deceptively sharp tale of friendship, family, and all the things that get in the way of both….This is a perfect book for a quick weekend read—warm, funny, yet full of insight.
[P]ropulsive, character-steeped story of two best friends.
"What happens when one accidental discovery changes everything you believe about yourself and the people you love? Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's unforgettable characters are so real, so human, and such good company (pun intended) as they struggle with profound questions about the lines between loyalty and secrecy, self-interest and self-preservation—and in doing so, ask us to do the same. Good Company is a beautifully nuanced meditation on marriage and friendship—their messiness and limitations, but also their boundless capacity for reinvention."
[Sweeney’s] warmth and wit refresh a tale as old as time.
"This effervescent, tender second novel by the bestselling author of The Nest is an enthralling saga of a marriage in midlife and the secrets that threaten to upend it."
"Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's rich love story about friends who become family is generous and heartbreaking and true. I loved The Nest and I love Good Company even more."
Masterfully building character…and dropping revelations through flashbacks, D’Aprix Sweeney’s writing is smooth and propelling. Readers of introspective, relational novels will devour this.
"A sheer delight."
Observer-Reporter (Pennsylvania)
12/01/2020
In this follow-up to Sweeney's 1.2 million-copy best-selling debut, The Nest , Flora Mancini finds an envelope containing the wedding ring her husband, Julian, supposedly lost way back. They've been together 20 years, first as struggling actors in New York barely managing to raise daughter Ruby and sustain Julian's little acting company, then with bigger success on the West Coast. Does Julian's duplicity mean their life together was a lie? With a 500,000-copy first printing.
2021-01-27
Thirteen years ago, when their daughter, Ruby, was 5 and they were having the happiest summer of their lives, Flora's husband, Julian, lost his wedding ring in a pond. The pond was on a property in upstate New York where Julian's theater group—Good Company—was putting on their annual outdoor play. There was a photo taken of the family sitting on the steps with their best friends, Margot and David, all leaning together, arms entwined around Ruby. Now Ruby is graduating from high school, and Flora is looking for the photograph to frame as a gift. In the process, she finds something else: the wedding ring that was supposed to be in the pond. While that unfortunate situation is unfolding in the present, flashbacks take us to the history of the friendships. Along the way, the characters' working worlds are depicted in absorbing detail: Margot is a megastar on a hospital TV series, Flora is a former Broadway singer and dancer, now a voice-over artist, David is—or was, actually—a cardiac surgeon. One of the best scenes in the book is the night David and Margot meet, over the body of a heart attack victim during Shakespeare in the Park. Always the New York maven, Sweeney nails the Central Park setting—"teenagers shrieking, the occasional smash of a bottle of beer morphing into a million glittering emeralds on the pavement"—and amusingly notes the many different versions of the story that survive over years of retelling. No one can agree how David ended up onstage or how they got to the Chinese restaurant afterward, but Margot "knew her version was—if not the most accurate—the best." All that said, this novel is far quieter than Sweeney's hit debut, The Nest (2016), and the characters are less well developed. We should know Flora best, but Margot is more clearly drawn (which would be no surprise to Flora, always second fiddle).
While a little thin, plotwise, Sweeney's second novel lives up to its title: warm, witty, and interesting.
"A sheer delight."
Sweeney’s effectiveness as a novelist stems from her protean sympathy, her ability to move among these characters and capture each one’s feelings without judgment. As we see some of the same events from various points of view, we don’t learn who was right — who could ever be right, after all? — but we get a poignant, sometimes comic sense of the way we each experience the same events, the same decisions, the same mistakes. In Sweeney’s hands, that’s not a recipe for endless conflict, but a road to understanding and — maybe — forgiveness.
If I could "go long" on a book the way it works with stocks, I would "go long" on Good Company. (Book Stock Exchange, anyone?) This will absolutely hit the lists due to its combination of approachable, skilled prose from the author of bestseller "The Nest," the fantastic characters, and the universally shared desire to figure out who we really are.
"Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney plumbs the depths of marriage, motherhood and friendship with warmth and wit. I devoured it in one gulp! Treat yourself to some Good Company ."
The vivacious and tender second novel by the bestselling author of The Nest is an absorbing, wise, and tender tale of a marriage in mid-life.
