POSH A Novel [Paperback]

Inside Manhattan's private school world of fast-paced over-the-top entitlement and superficial gloss lurk many secrets???the secrets of emotionally charged teenage and adult lives. In this eloquent novel set during one class's senior year at the Griffin School, among the queen bees and the wannabes, Michael Avery and Julianne Coopersmith begin a relationship. Their backgrounds are so different???he's beyond privileged and rich, her mother is a writer who drives a cab???but it's the rich boy who ends up being the needy one, with an emotional hole they both believe only Julianne can fill. Their parents are not immune from internal torture either???Michael's mother finds it easier to love her Chinese Crested Hairless than her own child, and Julianne's mother's protective instincts have unexpected consequences.

Fast-paced, gently satirical, yet deeply felt,Poshis a poignant and knowing novel.

Lucy Jackson is the pseudonym for an acclaimed short story writer and novelist. Her fiction has appeared inThe New Yorker,Best American Short Stories, and many other magazines and anthologies. She lives in New York.

1) The characters in POSH live in overlapping closed worlds: private school, Manhattan's Upper East Side, their rarefied social circles. Which world, in the end, do you think confines the characters the most?

2) Do you think Lazy Hoffman is a good steward of the Griffin School? And if so, in what ways? Is she a good daughter to Charlotte, her elderly mother?

3) No one ever said teenagers were easy to parent. Do you think the parents in POSH make mistakes in how they handle their teenagers' concerns, needs, and desires?

4) Did Dee do enough to protect her daughter from the emotional ravages that Julianne suffered in her relationship with Michael? Should Dee have made a greater effort to break up the relationship between them?

5) Do you think work and accomplishment define the characters in this novel ol£+