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"Didn't we meet in Capri last May?" Lucy continued, saying each word
cautiously.
"Yes!" Wyatt stopped in his tracks. "Yes!" It was the first time she
hadn't pronounced the name of the island like those unflattering
three-quarter length pants. "Go on, go on!"
In this beguiling retelling of the classic Pygmalion, we meet
Lucy Ellis, a Manhattan transplant who dreams of making it as a fashion
designer but instead toils away on a Garment District assembly line.
Road-blocked each time she tries to score a break, Lucy is beginning to
think the unthinkable: maybe it's time to pack it in and move home to
Minnesota. Then, during a torrential downpour, at her most bedraggled
and disheartened, Lucy meets Wyatt Hayes IV.
Wyatt -- man-about-town and bored Ph.D. anthropologist -- has just been
publicly dissed by New York's reigning socialite, Cornelia Rockman,
whom he'd been dating. He boasts to his best friend Trip that he can
transform any woman -- even a trailer-born nobody like Lucy -- into
this year's "It" girl. "Give me a few months," he tells Trip, "and I
could turn her into a social luminary. She'll make the rest of the pack
look like dim little tea lights." If Wyatt can fool the East Coast
aristocracy into thinking Lucy's the real deal, he can reveal the farce
behind Cornelia's social superiority complex . . . and score a
career-boosting book deal.
Headstrong Lucy challenges her teacher at every turn, but armed with a
made-up pedigree and a wardrobe costlier than most studio apartments,
she's soon navigating a world in which the most photographed socialite
takes all. Can Lucy survive in a wilderness where no girl wears the
same gown twice, the Astors are considered Johnny-come-latelies, and
weddings are more lavish than the coronation of Louis XIV? Will she
forge the connections needed to make a name for herself in fashion? And
can she surmount the schemes and suspicions of her newfound rival,
Cornelia?
Three months of rigorous prep and test runs culminate in Lucy's
showdown at the Fashion Forum Gala, where she and Wyatt confront the ne
plus
ultra of society . . . and their unexpected feelings for each
other. But the gaps between them -- as well as Wyatt's secret agenda --
may make this improbable couple an impossibility.
Set against the gold-plated world of Manhattan's social elite, The
Overnight Socialite puts a witty twenty-first-century spin on a
timeless story of transformation and unlikely love.
pub date: 2009-12-16 | hardcover | 9781602860827 |
