Paperback review: The Red Book, By Deborah Copakden Kogan

Kogan's contemporary take on the lives of four college friends has been likened to Mary McCarthy's The Group, and gives us a similar Ivy League set of young women who have found that life on the outside isn't what they thought it would be.

Meeting up on the 20th anniversary of their graduation are: the one who can't have children, the one who's a closet lesbian, the one whose career ground to a halt making babies, and the one who's suffered a bereavement then finds out that her first husband, her second husband, her best friend's husband and her mother all had affairs. Kogan weaves this group's emotional lives and their memories together rather skilfully, but the politics of McCarthy's original is missing, and the shock factor at the end is a little predictable.