The Other's Gold

June 17, 2019
Four women form an intense bond as college freshmen and support one another through life-altering mistakes across a decade and a half in Ames’s unfocused debut. In 2002, sporty Alice, uber-rich Ji Sun, stunningly beautiful but academically struggling Margaret, and feisty, adopted Lainey arrive at Quincy-Hawthorne College. After immediate friendship, Alice divulges that years before she caused her brother’s intellectual disability by intentionally pushing him off a tractor. In their sophomore year, all four become entranced by a popular professor until Ji Sun fabricates a claim of sexual harassment against him. After college they all gravitate to New York City, where Lainey becomes a well-known voice of the Occupy Movement and Alice struggles with fertility problems. The foursome’s friendship cools when Margaret, now a popular blogger and wife to a wealthy scion, crosses a serious line, and drifts further apart when Lainey makes an even more shocking mistake. Ames rarely provides sufficient retribution for characters’ bad decisions, and the tangents about their lives become distracting. Though there are moments of powerful emotion, and the details and emotional crises are well drawn, most readers will feel frustrated by the meandering plot and the characters’ choices. Agent: Lisa Grubka, Fletcher & Company.

June 15, 2019
Four women have their friendship tested by a series of traumatic revelations. As first-year students at the prestigious Quincy-Hawthorn College, four suitemates are thrown together and enter into an intensely close friendship. Lainey, a mixed-race adoptee, devotes herself to political activism and short-lived romances. Alice comes from an upper-crust white family and is on track to be a star athlete and pre-med student. Ji Sun, from Korea, is cocooned by her extraordinary wealth, and Margaret, from a lower-middle-class white Missouri family, by her extraordinary beauty. Ames structures this, her debut novel, in four parts, each of which corresponds, like an ethics textbook, to a different moral quandary centered on one of the women. In the novel's opening section, "The Accident," Alice struggles to keep secret from her new roommates a childhood trauma that wracks her with guilt. Further into their time at Quincy-Hawthorn, in the second section, "The Accusation," the women learn that Ji Sun plans to accuse her professor of sexual harassment. In the final two parts, "The Kiss" and "The Bite," Margaret and then Lainey--now new wives and mothers--inflict trauma on children in very different ways. Written in a deft omniscient narration, the novel's first half can sometimes blur the characters together within its slippery point of view, and the crushes and drunken exploits seem like overly familiar snapshots from collegiate life. But the novel sharpens when the women come into independent adulthood, and though the structure emphasizes the sameness of their transgressions--the way all of us will cross lines for morally complicated reasons--the characters finally bloom into vibrant individuality, and the book fulfills its promise to investigate the question Margaret asks herself near the book's finale: "Did loving so much mean you knew more about hatred?" A messy, but ultimately memorable, look at the moral gray areas that govern our choices.

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July 1, 2019
Lainey, Ji Sun, Alice, and Margaret met when they were placed in a suite together during their freshman year at Quincy-Hawthorn College. The foursome commonly sat together on the window seat, helping each other through the hardships of new adulthood, from hookups to heartbreak, rallies, and more. As the seasons changed, their bond grew, and each girl blossomed into her own while being supported by the others. However, each of them has secrets, some from childhood, some from college, and others from much later. Debut author Ames delicately weaves together a story dedicated to the intensity of friendship. Written in four parts, each featuring a mistake that one of the women made across her life from childhood to adulthood, this literary work illustrates the strength it takes to maintain closeness despite moral and ethical setbacks. Dealing with issues of guilt, pain, and the realistic, ruthless hardships of life, The Other's Gold shows that friends will stay by your side, if you let them fully in. Excellent for fans of Celeste Ng and Kristan Higgins.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2019, American Library Association.)