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This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman
In This Beautiful Life, the Bergamot family is on the way up. Richard Bergamot has left Cornell for a more prestigious position in New York City. His wife, Liz, has her doctorate, but she's decided to stay home to raise their kids. It's a world of private schools and hobnobbing with other privileged families. 15-year-old Jake goes to an unsupervised party and draws the unwanted attention of a 13-year-old girl named Daisy. Daisy ups the ante when she makes a pornographic video of herself and e-mails it to Jake. Unsure what to make of it, Jake forwards it to a friend and the video goes viral. This teenage lapse of judgment brings scorn, isolation, and expulsion, threatening to unravel everything the family has achieved. Helen Schulman's novel has received mostly positive reviews with the Washington Post saying, "This Beautiful Life is a powerful story of a good family in crisis. Schulman vividly portrays the circularity of events and the instantaneous connections of lives caught in a very real world wide web. How like the butterfly's wings when the mere tap of a key can unleash storms of such unimaginable consequence."
