Supremely funny as Kevin Kwan skewers snobbish Blue bloods, the Neuvo Riche and billionaires everywhere. Lucie, George and their immediate families seem like the only characters who are not caricatures of the super wealthy, upper crust. How Lucie could have put up with the obnoxious Cecil for as long as she did is not really as surprising as one would think. Lucie has many issues with her duel WASP and Chinese background.

If you are looking for a snippy, sarcastic laugh out loud romp through the Upper Crust then this is it. I can highly recommend this book to all romance fans.

On her first day on the island of Capri, Lucie Churchill (yes, one of those Churchills) sets her eyes on George Zao, and finds an instant attraction. They spend time together during her vacation, and ultimately she gives him up, torn between how her WASP family would view her relationship with an Asian man. Years later, Lucie is engaged and bumps into George. Sparks fly, but what does it mean?

Did Cecil write this? Because it completely sounds like something Cecil would write.

I feel like Kwan was trying too hard to recreate the success of Crazy Rich Asians while also doing a Jane Austen retelling within the upper stratospheres of rich WASP society, and it didn't quite work.

It's going to be a pop-up on Newtown Lane, right next to James Perse. We're going to start small at first and offer an Ayurvedic juice bar, qigong, puppy yoga, breath work meditation, and maybe some sound healing. See what the community responds to.


I feel that part of the issue was he tried to do too much—a scathing expose of WASP racism, a Jane Austen retelling, some mixed media aspects, and recapturing the gossipy and catty tone of CRA, complete with its name-dropping of all the Right brands and some gauche-riche brands and everything else.

While I liked that he did rip into cultural appropriation and racial microaggressions, I felt like it didn't go far enough? And that eventually the parody of the way white yogic gurus culturally appropriate, mutate, rebrand and sell back a traditional religion was...eventually also kinda adopted as okay in its ridiculousness?

I also felt that the first half was far too long. The summary made it feel like the first part in the past would be a brief prologue, but Capri was nearly half the book. The rest felt rushed and boring and artificial.

Plus the two leads were bland as mayonnaise.

Aside from her final moment, Lucie had absolutely no backbone or personal agenda. The lack of a backbone was completely justified based on her upbringing with her racist grandmother, who would dress her up in culturally inappropriate clothing as a child and call her her little China doll, but the lack of personal agenda was also...I dunno. She just went along with the flow the entire book, and did whatever was expected of her. She was something to everyone without ever feeling like a real person herself.

And George was...I could never get a good read on George. He was a self-named eco-warrior who fought for sustainable housing and eco-friendly other shit, but he never seemed to reflect on his own wealth or did anything about his family's environmentally damaging shipping industry. He felt like a hypocrite in his own way, wearing the best clothing and jet-setting across the world while advocating for environmentally sustainable solutions for the lower classes. He was a champion surfer. A glorious specimen of man. A hippy dude. A billionaire focused on the environment while living the high life. Obsessed with architecture and the love of one woman. Basically, he was Leonardo diCaprio...minus the love of one woman thing.

I did appreciate the subtle shout outs to Crazy Rich Asians though.

It did do a fantastic job of capturing the racism and exclusionary practices of the upper, upper crust WASP community, and the name-dropping and scrabbling among the lesser wealthy to elevate their own status.

It did a decent job retelling Persuasion (I think this is the one it was retelling), what with Lucie refusing George because of his ethnicity and her interracial identity coupled with her upbringing and not wanting to further sully her family (her grandmother and family did a number on her), and a sex scandal that wasn't.

And Cecil was an absolute asshat—although one that you could kiiiiiiinda root for, since he was trying to break into the upper crust, so Kwan succeeded in that?

Overall, this wasn't a bad book. I appreciate what it was trying to do, although it failed on the execution.

There was a lot of vanity, and not a whole lot of sex.

I received this ARC from NetGalley for an honest review

Sex and Vanity was everything I expected from a Kevin Kwan book—over the top, decadent and delicious!! I haven't read the Crazy Rich Asians series (though I did see the movie) so this book felt really fresh to me- a perfect summer read!

I loved the Crazy Rich Asians series and was super excited at the opportunity to read Sex and Vanity. I liked the book a lot. However, I did find the beginning of the book more enjoyable. In the second half of the book, I just could not believe that Lucie would even date a man like Cecil much less be engaged to him. All in all, the characters were fun and funny and it was an enjoyable read. Thank you NetGalley for the ARC.

Thanks to Partner NetGalley for the digital ARC of Kevin Kwan's Sex and Vanity in exchange for an honest review. The book releases Tuesday, July 14.

I had high hopes for Kevin Kwan's Sex and Vanity. I enjoyed the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy, with its examination of class difference, of tradition, and of the ways that groups can discriminate within.

Sex and Vanity has many of the elements that I so enjoyed in the trilogy: Kwan builds a vivid portrait of wealth and privilege beginning with the attendance of Lucie Churchill and her cousin Charlotte at a lavish wedding. As soon as they land on Capri, Lucie and Charlotte are swept up in a crowd where education matters--parenthetical lists of all of the schools someone has attended follow every character's introduction--and extreme, thoughtless spending is an expectation.

Lucie, the daughter of a white, upper-class father and a Chinese-American mother, has been caught since childhood in the web of her white family's discomfort with her Chinese features. Charlotte--her cousin on her father's side--makes a point, when she introduces Lucie, of explaining the full history of their connection. This practice, of course, only makes Lucie more aware of Charlotte's discomfort with her mother, a discomfort that plagues Lucie's relationships with all of her white family.

At the heart of the novel is Lucie's relationship with George Zao, who she meets at the wedding. Lucie isn't sure, from the beginning, what to make of George--at first, he seems cold and disengaged, but as she comes to know him, she begins to admire all that he does well.

Lucie continues to be drawn to George, and their connection grows. Until something happens at the wedding. Then, we're propelled five years into the future, in New York City, where Lucie is engaged to an extravagantly wealthy, "new money" heir from Texas. And then she sees George again . . .

There is a certain glee, a delicious wickedness, to the way that Kwan describes the world in which Lucie, her family, and her friends live, throwing around brand names and lavish descriptions. He employs liberally the footnotes that are so fun in his original trilogy, speaking to the reader and providing further explanations of just how wealthy and overboard these people are. And I get it. But at a certain point, it became less fun than tiresome for me. I also really disliked Lucie. Kwan does a lot of work to make her empathetic, and certainly, the way that her family treats her is horrible. But--again, for me--she acts horribly. She does some really loathsome things in her quest to shape her life so that she can fit in. And her redemption comes too late in the book.

I really loved Kevin Kwan's Crazy Rich Asians series and had high expectations for this book. However, this book didn't grab hold of me and it took me a while to finish. It could be because Lucie and the other characters seemed very one dimensional and generic that I often had trouble telling them apart. Despite its flaws, this book will still fly off the shelves in the library for those looking for a breezy read.

What a fabulous book. This book has everything - crazy rich people, gorgeous settings, fantastic characters, a few really memorable quotes, a HEA and sex and vanity.
This book revolves around Lucie (half Asian) who honestly is a hot mess who goes to Capri to attend a wedding in 2013, meets these amazing people (hello, can I please be besties with Rosemary Zao?), has a holiday fling then fast forward five years where she (no spoilers here)... The book is quite different from Crazy Rich Asians (except for the fabulously wealthy part) but I enjoyed it for what it was. The characters are so well written, I wanted to reach through the pages and shake my head at most of them. Another fun read by Kevin Kwan - thank you very much to Penguin Random House and NetGalley for allowing me to read the ARC.

Read if you: Are eagerly anticipating the next Kevin Kwan novel.

I have mixed feelings about this book. Kwan is a clever and funny writer, but this is not on the same scale as Crazy Rich Asians. Although I didn't love--or even really like--most of the characters in Crazy Rich Asians (the movie is much less satirical and has a bit more heart), I enjoyed that book for its humor, its secondary characters, and the evocative descriptions of ultra-wealthy Singapore life. The constant name-dropping of schools (preschool/private school/boarding school/college) after each character became tiresome. This is a take on E.M. Forster's A Room With a View, but you don't need to be familiar with the book/movie.

Librarians/booksellers: This will likely be in demand.

Many thanks to Doubleday Books and NetGalley for a digital review copy in exchange for an honest review.

Kevin Kwan follows the formula that worked so well in Crazy Rich Asians but it just doesn’t work in this book. The characters were impossible to tell apart and the whole thing was convoluted and confusing. I wanted to like it but didn’t. I do not recommend this book.

From the creator of "Crazy Rich Asians" comes a new world of over-the-top money, family, and romance in New York. When George and Lucie meet at a friend's wedding they are teens who barely speak to each other but are still drawn together. One night, one indiscretion, and one drone send them apart. Years later they are back in each other's orbit and Lucie has to decide if she's going to stay on the path she's planned for herself since she was 8 years old, or take a risk and go for what her heart really wants.

"Sex and Vanity" is a pretty good description of most of the people in this book- emphasis on the vanity. It's "Crazy Rich Asians" up a notch. The only exceptions seem to be our heroes, Lucy and George and their mothers- all other friends and family are shameless name droppers and have black belts in one-upmanship. Lucy has spent her life trying to fit into this world, while believing that she isn't good enough for it because she's half-Asian and she doesn't look like her father's Plymouth Rock WASP family. Every time she manages to enjoy a moment as herself, something happens to shock her or shame her back into her protective little shell. She thinks she has to be what everyone else wants her to be, but George sees her for who she actually is, or could be.

While I enjoyed the book, with its fast paced writing style and breezy over-the-top world, I wish we had gotten to see George more. The reader actually gets very little "George" time, which makes it hard to believe in love between George and Lucie. He almost never talks, does nice things without fanfare but just to help people (which is great, no complaints there- especially compared to Cecil!) but I hard a hard time following Lucie through her feelings for him. At first she doesn't like him, on no basis at all. Then she does, on no basis at all. Magnetic pull might be a good start to a relationship, but it never got beyond that for me. He seemed like a Mr. Darcy type who never got turned into a character to know, but just an idea.

Light summer fun to help make people smile, "Sex and Vanity" will be enjoyed by everyone who enjoyed the world of "Crazy Rich Asians".

I received an ARC of this book from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review

A new book by Kevin Kwan! I was so excited to read this book because I loved the Crazy Rich Asians series so much! This is a different kind of book but you can definitely feel the Kevin Kwan vibe - it was a quick, easy to read, fun novel!

I liked the premise of this book, but the story was a little slow to take off. It was not as engaging at Kevin Kwan’s other books, and that was disappointing to me. I think it’s hard to write about ridiculous, extreme people, and in this book it just didn’t land for me.

This book is a new offering by the author of Crazy Rich Asians and its follow-ups, and is just as much fun as that series.

Rather than going to Asia, though, we mostly are hanging out in New York (though there's plenty of characters from all over the world.)

The story starts with a flashback to an uber-exclusive wedding on Capri. Lucie Churchill is a descendent of those Churchills, but her mother's heritage is Chinese. At the wedding, Lucie is a young Brown University student, traveling with her incredibly uptight cousin as a chaperone. She meets George, a Crazy Rich Asian from Hong Kong/Sydney/UC Berkeley. He and his mother are kind of odd ducks to the old money NY bunch, but Lucie is oddly drawn to him. There's an incident at the wedding that horrifies the cousin/chaperone, Lucie is whisked away, and we go to NYC five years later.

Lucie is now an up and coming art consultant and gets engaged to an oil money "most eligible bachelor" in a scene straight out of a Hollywood musical adaptation. Her family heads to the Hamptons for the weekend, and who show up but George and his mama?

Lucie is a really likeable character. While the book is a fun romp through Crazy Rich New York, the heart is about Lucie and her family dynamic, and it's well done. Kwan's writing style is enjoyable to me - the kind of poke fun at the insider group dynamic - but I admit that as a solid middle-class non-fashionista, non-society follower, some of the name dropping of both people and brands goes well over my head. The footnotes are funny, as they were in the previous books, but as a suggestion I would recommend a physical book. Reading the footnotes on the Kindle app is a little tedious.Narrative is scattered through with texts, emails, or news items, which keeps the pace moving and the voice of the book feels correct.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed the book. If you liked Crazy Rich Asians, don't hesitate to grab this one!

The quintessential summer read, I predict staycation readers everywhere will delight in Kwan’s colorful characters as they navigate embarrassing relatives and true love in pages punctuated with amusing footnotes that lend humor to privilege.

As soon as I heard Kevin Kwan was releasing a new book, I wanted to snap it up. But while there are some similarities with Crazy Rich Asians, Sex and Vanity is also quite different, for both good and ill. This is less fluffy, more substantive, but doesn't always come together the way I wanted it to.

What Sex and Vanity does really well is tackle big issues like racism, internalized racism, and the complexities of being of mixed race. The early portion of the book has more of the fun and silly tone you see in Crazy Rich Asians, but it becomes much more serious and that sometimes meshes less well with the often flippant style of writing. Uneven pacing and a plot arc that involves cheating on a somewhat clownish significant other also detracted from the overall story.

Lucie Churchill is from elite lineage, but struggles with her biracial identity. With a white dad and a Chinese mom, she never feels white enough or Asian enough and deals with a lot of internalized racism, partly due to microagressions from her WASPish family. The first half of this book takes place across a few days at a wedding when she is 19, but the rest of the book is more spread out and takes place a few years later. This pacing feels a little weird and sometimes plodding, especially because we are primarily follow Lucie's story rather than a whole cast of characters. (We do get other perspectives occasionally, but Lucie is clearly the MC)

I did really like seeing Lucie's journey toward love and self-acceptance, but along the way that includes kind of cheating on her fiancee and I wish that had been handled differently. And the fiancee is portrayed as very ridiculous. Including a strange scene involving his desire for role-playing during sex that I think is intended to be funny, but for me was just awkward and cringe-worthy.

Ultimately, I had mixed feelings on this one. I liked what Kwan was trying to do here, but I'm not sure it always quite landed. I received an advance copy of this book for review from the publisher. All opinions are my own.

So this was a pretty wild read, I did enjoy the lightness and silliness of it all. The main character Lucie annoyed me at first and made me feel as if she was being selfish. At the end, I did find the reason why she was acting out and why she needed to control the way her life was headed. Let me tell you that it was pretty dark once I started really to think about, but I won't get into that since it was above all a great happy little beach read.

It didn't compare to Crazy Rich Asians which is why I gave it three stars but I just couldn't make the same rating as the trilogy, It doesn't have anything to do with the Crazy Rich Asians trilogy but it did kind of remind of it with the way Kwan seems to write his stories and characters. Also being from Long Island and I lived on the east coast myself near the Hamptons. I can tell you that yes they are like that.

So I never read Pride and Prejudice (GASP!! What kind of reader and Library worker has never read Pride and Prejudice? Oh shush it's on my to-do list of maybe one day) but from my understanding, it was a retelling of it. I cannot compare but I still liked it and If this becomes a series like Crazy Rich Asians then you bet your butt I'm in line to grab the next one!

If this this were a movie I'd watch it, but it falls pretty flat as a novel. An over the top wedding party gets way out of control, with characters defined by their academic, social and financial credentials and not one the reader will remember or care about after they're introduced by their stereotypes. If you loved Crazy Rich Asians, which suffered from some of these flaws but was redeemed by its flair and pizzazz, which translated brilliantly from page to screen, ignore this heavily hyped book and wait for the movie .

I was excited to read this book, since I was a big fan of the Crazy Rich Asians series. I ended up having mixed feelings, so this more like a 2.5-3 star book for me.

What I Enjoyed:
- Author continues to use deliciously snarky footnotes
- Lovingly skewers the wealthy (new and old money) and their hanger-ons
- Features a hapa main character, who aren't often featured in popular U.S. fiction
- Crazy Rich Asian characters make brief cameos (love Kitty Pong's mention!)
- Good assortment of side characters who are fun to follow

What I Didn't Like:
- I found it hard to sympathize with the main character, Lucie. She seemed incredibly young and naive, and I probably would have enjoyed it more if she was a little older. The first section (where she's 19) had more of a YA feel. I enjoy reading YA, but this isn't a YA novel.
- Romance felt underdeveloped and very "love at first sight"
- Thinking back to Crazy Rich Asians, I'm not a huge fan of the author's main characters in general. I'm all about his side characters, who have richer personalities and are more fun to read about.
- It's missing a strong sense of conflict (other than Lucie's terrible behavior towards Rosemary Zao). Things resolved pretty smoothly and then just moved towards a happy ending.
- I'd consider this a beach read, but because of everything going on in the world right now, it didn't resonate with me. That's not really the fault of the book, but reading about wealthy people problems didn't really provide an escape. Probably not the right book for me at this time.

Another fun, satirical read from Kevin Kwan. While seemingly lighthearted, it does touch upon some serious issues like racism. Lucie was a little hard to relate to at first and her naivety was a little grating but, as usual, the supporting characters steal the show. Love the surprise cameo if one of my favorites from his first trilogy.

My first Kwan read was a hit for me. I was quickly hooked with all the quirky characters and the location. I didn’t even like any of the characters and still I enjoyed this read very much, it was hard to put down. The visuals were amazing, Mr. Kwan writes images so beautifully. We star is one of the most stunning places, Capri Italy. Lucie and her cousin (chaperon) are there for a wedding. Not a normal wedding, no imagine having an endless budget and a need to wow the world type wedding and you’d still to get close. It was a jaw dropping experience. While there she manages to meet a sexy Chinese man, one her family and friends would not approve of. In this world money and status comes trumps love every time. Too bad they keep getting thrown together and the feelings are real, even if not welcome.
Lucie is half Asian and was raise all her life not to let down her family. Avoiding her Asian heritage trying to blend in with her billionaire friends. She’s nasty, racist, a chameleon, who judges all based on her narrow views. I never grew to like her at all.