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This Beautiful Life by Helen Schulman

August 2011

THIS BEAUTIFUL LIFE by Helen Schulman is a haunting novel about what happens to a family when a 15-year-old boy gets an inappropriate video from a young girl he knows --- and forwards it on. This seemingly small action snowballs, and suddenly two kids are fodder for the tabloids in a story that will not go away. In the world as we know it now, stories go viral, the Internet has its own fingerprints, and visual memories are a mere click away.

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Week of February 6, 2012

In DREAMS OF JOY, Lisa See returns to the story of sisters Pearl and May from SHANGHAI GIRLS, and Pearl’s strong-willed 19-year-old daughter Joy, who runs away to Shanghai in early 1957 to find her birth father.

In Helen Schulman THIS BEAUTIFUL LIFE, 15-year-old Jake Bergamot receives --- and then forwards to a friend --- a sexually explicit video that an eighth-grade admirer sent to him. The video goes viral within hours, and the scandal that ensues threatens to shatter his family and his world.

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