*Given a copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. The book review below may contain spoilers*
Summary: A woman uproots her family from Paris to Los Angeles to support her husband’s dream job. As soon as she is in L.A., she crashes her car into another belonging to a supermodel. They are then transported to a 1996 photo shoot in Mexico, where they first met early in their careers. The familiarity helps them become friends, then lovers. As the affair ensues, more revelations emerge in their collective memories about what really happened in Mexico.
Synopsis: Cecilia Chen is a Jamaican-Chinese photographer who uproots her family from Paris to Los Angeles to support her husband François’s directing gig on a franchise film. An American raised in New York, she worries about bringing her teen son, Julien, and preteen daughter, Lucie, to California. It’s 2015, a time when her kids may be identified as only Black and be in danger because of it. And François recently revealed that he cheated with a young actress. So, she is pressured to move abroad to keep her family together.
As soon as she is in L.A., she crashes her car into another. Supermodel Anouk Ferrand steps out. Convincing herself that she almost killed the celebrity, Cecilia is then transported to a 1996 photo shoot in Cabo San Lucas. It’s where she first met Anouk, then a rising model, while working as a photographer’s assistant.
Cecilia eventually tells Anouk about their connection. But she keeps it simple. Deep down, she knows something awful had happened to Anouk, but her memory can’t access that part of the trip. They become ladies who lunch, gallivanting around the city with their wealth and flaunting their love for the arts. Then, lunch turns into forbidden rendezvous and global getaways that force both women to give into their desires out of sight of their husbands and children.
The full-blown affair stimulates more memory collection from the shoot where they first met. The weekend becomes less fragmented throughout the book as we revisit different scenes across the present. Once Cecilia realizes what happened to Anouk, she wonders if the woman she has fallen in love with has pieced together another reality.
Theme: Beauty & Sexuality
Cecilia is mesmerized by Anouk’s beauty at first glance in the flashbacks and in the present. With an eye for natural beauty, she centers her latest visual art exhibit around the topic and the women she believes meet the threshold. Anouk is one of her subjects, but it shows how Cecilia feels insecure and voiceless among the beautiful people, including her Jamaican mother, who obsesses over beauty and perfection.
As her idea of beauty drives her art and her extramarital affair, she tries to dodge the regret and uncertainty of the past that leads to deceit.
Theme: Race & Ethnicity
Race, ethnicity, and culture are central themes in Cecilia’s point of view. She constantly mentions her Jamaican-Chinese background as she relates to the family she started and the family she was born into.
As for Julian and Lucie, she worries about how they will be perceived in the U.S. compared to France. Her concerns come true as both her children learn that they are Black in incidents with peers that are out of her control. As she falls deeper in lust, she has to pull herself out momentarily to remember that her children need additional care in the face of their racial classification.
Anouk has roots in Martinique, so she is part-Black but fair-skinned. This intrigues Cecilia as she notes she is the darkest in her Caribbean family. She senses how Anouk skates through life as a supermodel married to a billionaire with her fair complexion. While Cecilia worries about how she’s perceived as a Black woman in America, she is drawn to witnessing how Anouk doesn’t have those worries, though they have roots from islands in the same ocean.
Theme: Regret
The story is built on regret and uncertainty. Cecilia convinces herself she owes Anouk because she knew something happened in Mexico decades ago. She hides this regret for not being able to save Anouk during that shoot, though she wouldn’t know what to save her from.
The affair also forces her to question whether she would have ended up with her husband after falling for Anouk at the shoot. If she had saved her all those years ago, would they have ended up together then? Cecilia wonders about the likelihood amid her frustration that her husband cheated on her while he was away from home, hence why L.A. is now her new home.
As the regret weighs on her, she learns from Anouk that her ex-boyfriend, Lorry, also lives in L.A. Lorry is a meditation coach who serves wealthy clientele. This revelation sends Cecilia into another nostalgic tailspin, recalling memories of love and disappointment with the man she believed she would marry. He broke up with her while she was away on the shoot. The pivotal moment gnaws at her even more as she figures out her connection with Anouk and Lorry, then and now.
Conclusion: Lust, betrayal, greed, and wealth underlie the main character’s thought process as she questions how they intersect with her life. That being said, it’s a juicy, slow read that forces the reader to absorb the environments, the interactions, and the actions that make the characters feel authentically messy.
In Cecilia’s voice for the present and third-person voice for the flashbacks in Mexico, the character’s emotions jump off the page. She is working through her new life and wondering if she is making the right decisions when people from her past crash in.