If you’re a girl-adult who goes to bridal showers drunk, loathes pastel
with a superhuman passion and wonders whatever happened to, like,
dating: someone wrote you a book.
The generally acclaimed debut novel from Jennifer Close, Girls
in White Dress, isn’t as (terrible word alert) chick-litty as you’d
think. Sure, the cosmopolitan one-liners can feel lifted from a certain
’90s HBO show. But her interconnected short stories, tracing familiar
patterns of post-graduate ennui and reluctant maturity among New York
twenty-somethings, have a welcome and sardonic honesty. There’s a dark
thread in all the air-light dresses, seen by Close as more economic
burden than feminine pleasure. If you tug a little, it unravels a hard
knowing: happiness doesn’t get easier, and getting older sometimes just
feels like getting less young.
This isn’t a beach read, but a transitional one, for girls between
seasons. Sarah Nicole Prickett
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