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I recently received a copy of the novel Everybody Rise by Stephanie Clifford. I've heard lots of comparisons of it to Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep and Edith Wharton's House of Mirth so I thought it would be an interesting read.

Here's a plot summary from GoodReads:

It’s 2006 in the Manhattan of the young and privileged, and a new generation of heirs and strivers are jockeying for social power and discovering that class, especially on the Upper East Side, still holds sway.

At 26, Evelyn Beegan is the product of new money, propelled by her social-climbing mother through an elite prep school, a posh college, and into Manhattan. Evelyn has always managed to stay just on the periphery of this world her mother so desperately wants her to become a part of. But when she takes a job at People Like Us, a new social networking site aimed at her very elite peers, she’s forced to leverage her few connections to work her way to the front of the pack. With the help of her prep school friends, Evelyn goes from lush "camps" in the Adirondacks and "cottages" in Newport, to Southampton weekends and clubs thick with socialites and Wall Street types, eventually befriending target #1, Camilla Rutherford—a young woman who is a regular on the front page of every society blog.

In order to be accepted by this rarefied set, Evelyn must be seen as someone with established old money. Her lies start small, but quickly grow, and as she relentlessly elbows her way up the social ladder, the ground underneath her begins to give way.

My thoughts:

There's nothing really new or exciting with Rise, it's a classic outsider-looking-in cautionary tale. Name drop some "it" clothing designers and it's a genre I like to refer to as aspirational chick lit. That being said, Everybody Rise is above average aspirational chick lit.

One of my chief pet peeves about chick lit is one dimensional characters. I found that in Rise character development was very well done, even though I ended up hating Evelyn and thought she got what she deserved.

A subplot featuring Evelyn, her social-climbing mother, and her lawyer father was more enjoyable than the main plot. Evelyn's father is a wildly-successful lawyer which gives the family the money Evelyn's mother had always dreamed about, but not the social cache she also desired.

Even though this book is better than a huge majority of the chick lit available in the market, it does have its downsides. Like I mentioned earlier, you've probably read this book before. The outside is desperate to get into the inner circle and she does so on a series of lies. Of course, everything comes crashing down and the main character tucks her tail in between her legs and goes home. Rise is so formulaic that you can guess what actions Evelyn will take next, or what her next lie might be. Everything was just so predictable that after awhile it was tiresome.

The ending is a bit of a surprise. I wouldn't call it a happy or a sad ending, but it's redeeming. 

I really feel like this book had a lot of promise. It feels rushed in places, and I think with some more story development and a change of Evelyn's complete and utter idiocy, Rise could have been a "classic" popular fiction novel, not unlike The Devil Wears Prada  or The Nanny Diaries.


Everybody Rise ambitiously set out to be the House of Mirth for the Millennial generation.However, a lack of story development keeps it to just a beach/weekend read and nothing more.

 Everybody Rise by Stephanie Clifford will be released on August 18, 2015, by St. Martin's Press.