Our score
Excellent
The Shampoo Effect
Jenny Jackson's The Shampoo Effect is a funny, sharp-eyed contemporary novel about friendship, love, and growing up late. A newcomer named Caroline Lash falls for a local in a Massachusetts seaside town, then collides with his childhood friends, whose old loyalties crack when an unexpected pregnancy upends the circle.
From the review
Every tight group of friends runs on rules nobody ever said out loud, and nobody notices them until an outsider walks into one. In Jenny Jackson's The Shampoo Effect, a witty contemporary novel of friendship and midlife drift, that outsider is Caroline Lash. She arrives in the seaside town of Greenhead, Massachusetts, and falls for Van Whittaker almost on sight. He wears fleece, picks up litter wherever he goes, lives for his kayak, and has an eager, goofy charm that makes the fast romance easy to believe. Van also comes with a childhood circle that has never had to make room for anyone. That circle is the real subject, and Jackson sketches its members quickly. Bailey is Van's ex, the one people orbit without quite deciding to. Augusta comes from old money and wears her snobbery comfortably. Fran has run out of patience for men in general. Colin and RJ are in the mix as partners. They've known one another since they were kids, they spend summers outdoors with their own children underfoot, and they've built a private language of habits and loyalties that Caroline can't read. The novel is funny about how exclusive that feels from inside, and how bruising it feels from outside.
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