Something Blue

Darcy Rhone has been the golden girl since high school, with the looks, the charm and a life other people envy. Then her best friend Rachel starts seeing Dex, Darcy's fiancé, and Darcy learns she is pregnant by one of the groomsmen.

She cannot face the pity and gossip waiting for her at home. So she leaves for London to stay with her childhood friend Ethan, expecting a glamorous fresh start on a new continent.

London does not deliver it. Ethan refuses to indulge her, and she meets a loneliness she has never had to sit with. The pregnancy is something she is entirely unprepared for, and she has no plan for it.

This is the second novel in Emily Giffin's pair of companion books, following Something Borrowed, and it is narrated by Darcy herself. In that first book she is the friend readers are meant to root against. Here she gets her own voice, and the book follows her through a year abroad.

The story is a redemption arc about friendship, self-awareness and forgiveness. Reading it means spending that year with a woman who is hard to like at the start, and watching her face the gap between the life she planned and the one she actually has.