This Beautiful Life - Helen Schulman

It’s every parent’s nightmare: one impulsive move by an otherwise good kid—in this case the forwarding of a sexually explicit video—throws a family into crisis and exposes every fault line in a marriage. In This Beautiful Life (Harper Perennial, $13.99), Helen Schulman takes a ripped-from-theheadlines plot and renders it into a finely crafted and nuanced narrative of a family disassembling under pressure. Although the author depicts a world of privilege in which children have slumber parties at the Plaza Hotel and where diversity at the elite Manhattan private school they attend consists of “millionaires…and…billionaires,” the stressful details and the high stakes of parenting will ring true to anyone who has ever spent a sleepless night worrying about her teen.