My Interest
Reece Witherspoon’s Book Club is reading The Guest List this month, so I decided to join them. She has announced a second, topical pick for this month, I’m Still Here by Austin Channing Brown, which I bought for Kindle but have not started reading yet.
The Story
High-powered London online magazine creator and social media influencer Jules, is set to marry her perfect man–t.v. survival show hottie, Will. Jule’s secures a tiny island over Ireland for a new-to-the-world wedding venue. The dress is perfect, the venue is perfect, but, is the perfect man, really…perfect? A note slipped into her things tells her he’s not the man he appears to be. Should she worry?
Will is attended by a pack of posh Public school [private boarding school in England] mates all still pretty obsessed with the juvenile antics of their school–especially a sort of torture game called “Survival.” Secrets abound about their time at school, their Stag Party trip to another deserted island, this time off Sweden. What happened at the Stag, does it really have to stay on the Stag?
Then there is Hannah, wife of Jules’ “best friend”–yes, she’s so ultra-cool she has a married guy with a child as her bff. Jule’s need of Charlie leaves his wife mostly abandoned. So why is Hannah so drawn to Jule’s half-sister?
My Thoughts
This story rockets to a fireworks show of an ending! It is perfectly paced, the chapters are just enough, but never bog the story down in one of the bogs surrounding the wedding venue, aka The Folly. The last third of the story had my heart racing–I could not put it down till I got to the very end.
My Verdict
4.0
I will definitely go back and read her previous book The Hunting Party and maybe a few of her other backlist titles. The Guest List was compelling, I really hope they live up to it.
The Guest List: A Novel by Lucy Foley
My Reviews of Other Hello Sunshine Book Club picks:
Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Daisy Jones and The Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid
Next Year in Havana by Chanel Cleeton
Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal
Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
Hopewell's Public Library of Life 
I haven’t read this one yet, but I did like Foley’s The Hunting Party. 🙂
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Good to hear!
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I’ve seen her books in the shops but wasn’t that compelled to pick this one – I think the public school behaviour put me off
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Except for some uber-rich on both coasts, there are few who go to boarding school here. We can’t stand them either, but there are so few–Kennedys mostly. The school wasn’t, at least, supposed to be Eton. I doubt if 1 in 1000 Americans could name even one USA boarding school. I’m fascinated by the whole culture so I can name most–like a hobby.
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