"You have the pretty girls like Reya with the all-expenses-paid lifestyle. Their parents are doctors, judges, and business owners, and they are happy to foot the bill for luxury cars and rotating designer wardrobes. It's all tiny golf club sets as toddlers, diamond earrings in middle school, and fancy cars on sixteenth birthdays. An after-school job? For what?!
As you might have guessed, I do not fall into that category. Instead, I'm standing here at the bus stop, in this blazing heat, because my parents share our one family car and I need to get to work."
Lisa Morin and I have been besties for about fifteen years. I met her when she arrived at UMaine to start her job. I knew from our first meeting that I wanted to be her friend. We bonded over mutual interests like ending campus student food insecurity. One year she took me to an international conference on the subject. We got to know and love each other's kids. When I had the stroke she was there for me and when I got my degree she was for sure celebrating 🍾.
Why this trip down memory lane? Our friendship ❤️ is a story of how beautiful and life affirming a deep for better or worse friendship can be. It gets me mad when society celebrates romance and denigrates friendship. We say just friendship like it's nothing. What I like best about Anita Wilson's Pretty Girl County is that it centers around female friendship. No matter what romances are struggling or thriving the focus is on co narrators Reya and Sommer.
The girls grew up together closely bonded in a poorer town. They were in and out of each other's homes, doing everything together, sharing hopes and dreams as their parents struggled to provide them with better lives. Reya's mom, by putting herself through law school, is able to move herself and her daughter into a mansion in a much more affluent and prestigious town. Despite attending the same school the girls pretty much lose touch.
In their senior year closing in on graduation Reya is in crisis mode. Her life long dream has been to get into Fashion Institute of Technology--"the Dior of fashion design programs"--for a way to get into her dream career. Sadly she's been waitlisted. In order to beat out the others on the list, she's directing and providing the garments for the school's annual fashion show...
...which is far from turning into the shining success she needs. Someone suggests she recruit Sommer, whose skill set is just what she needs, to be on Team Reya...
...Sommer, feeling betrayed and abandoned, is far from enthusiastic about the prospect. And she's having her own crises. Not only is she trying desperately to afford her dream school, Spelman, but things are about to get more precarious for her family. Her father's beloved bookstore is in the path of gentrification and slated to be demolished...
...unless someone with the prestige and connections of Reya's mother...
...so can the girls put aside hurts and suspicions to help each other? Can this friendship be saved?
Only one way to find out.
On a purrrsonal note, the sunrise this morning was so gorgeous it almost took my breath away. Vibrant luminous shades of apricot and rose stretched across the horizon while above pink clouds drifted across a pale blue sky. It was particularly striking when Eugene and I crossed the bridge and saw everything reflected upside down in the river. Particularly vivid sunrises are one of the very few up sides to winter.
A great big shout out goes out to you, with hopes that you too had a good start to your day.
Sent from my U.S.Cellular© Smartphone
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