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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.

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.