Girls in White Dresses - Jennifer Close

Brimming with characters you feel you've known forever, Girls in White Dresses announces a strikingly original new voice, chronicling the struggles and unexpected joys of modern life.

Isabella, Mary and Lauren's friend Kristi is engaged and they are all bridesmaids. Despite being happy for their friend, by the sixth shower they are really sick of celebrating her. Saturday after Saturday they coo over toaster ovens and deep fat fryers. They collect wrapping paper and ribbons, tying them to paper plates. But beneath the toasting and clapping, we see these women struggling amid the celebration. Isabella dreams of quitting her job at a mailing list company, where she's both extremely successful and wildly unhappy. Mary falls deeply in love, realizing too late that her new mother-in-law is really her husband's favorite. And Lauren, single and adrift, finds herself drawn to a man she's pretty sure she hates.

Wry, hilarious, and utterly recognizable, Girls in White Dresses follows these women as they maneuver their way through blind dates and ski vacations, boozy lunches and family holidays, through relationships lost to politics and others found in a pet store.