​​What a title. It scared me a little at first because I thought it would be about some kind of witches’ coven. Instead, behind one of the catchiest titles I’ve ever heard, is a story about mothers and daughters and about friendship and love.  
 
The story wastes no time in getting to the inciting incident. Right on the third page we learn that Siddalee Walker, a theatre director, has spilled her soul to a New York Times reporter who writes that Vivi Abbott Walker, her mother, was a tap-dancing child abuser. Ouch. Vivi is so hurt she refuses to speak to Sidda for months. But the fact that one time Vivi did beat all her children, with her eldest daughter Sidda taking the brunt of the belt buckle, will not go away. Sidda has spent her whole life trying to make sense of this event and of her mother’s subsequent lengthy absence. However, thanks to the intervention of her three best friends, who with her compose the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Vivi agrees to send her daughter a scrapbook she calls her Divine Secrets, and which Siddalee has asked for to help her prepare for directing a play about women and friendship.

​​This rich emerald green with black and white contrasting colours has got to be one of the more gorgeous covers in the Penguin Drop Caps series. The initial L is in fact composed of two Ls, one a black woodblock style, the vertical line dotted with the windows of high-rise apartments, the other a white curlicue L dancing over top. Jessica Hische’s drop cap makes allusion to the New York setting of the novel, as well as the dual identities of the narrator, a Korean-American industrial spy.
 
On the back is the quote “Quell the old tongue, loosen the lips. Listen, the hawk and cry of the American city.” This perfectly captures Chang-Rae Lee’s lyrical style, his frequent use of the word quell (four times), and the themes of language and the urban melting-pot.

“Know thyself.” ~ Greek maxim
 
Gretchen Rubin is a self-confessed habit-junkie. Even more than obsessing about her own habits, she gets a thrill from helping her friends and family improve theirs. And she’s on a mission to help change yours and mine. She came to habits in an unusual way, by first focusing on happiness. What will make me more happy, she asked herself? And in 2009 she published the result of her one-year quest to become more happy, The Happiness Project. Through this process, she came to believe that if happiness is the destination, habit-change might well be the journey. But how can people go about changing their habits, she wondered? ​

​The Penguin Drop Caps edition is a vibrant fluorescent yellow with bright green stain on the edges of the page. The contrast colour on the spine and the initial H is sky blue. I puzzled over the initial for a long time, trying to figure out its connection to the story. Perhaps the blue swirls symbolize the river, a central character. The H is composed of two swirly lines that intertwine in the middle; is this a reference to the notion of oneness? “And all of it together, all voices, all goals, all yearnings, all sufferings, all pleasures, all good and evil—the world was everything together.” (p. 187) I also noticed the font was considerably larger than the other Drop Caps volumes, which meant this would be a shorter read. Good thing. 
 

            “To me, O’Hara is the real Fitzgerald.”
—Fran Lebowitz, The Paris Review, 1993
 
Gloria Wandrous is young, beautiful, liberated and alcoholic. She wakes up the morning after spending the night with wealthy businessman Weston Liggett who has ripped her dress down the centre seam when she plays coy. Having nothing to wear home she wanders through his Upper East Side apartment, eventually finding a mink coat in what she assumes is his wife’s closet. Putting it on over the remains of her dress, she hails a cab and leaves.
 
The rest of the story is a meander through the speakeasies, restaurants and bedrooms of New York as Liggett tries to recover the coat before his wife notices it's missing. The novel moves seamlessly from past to present, revealing key characters’ stories along the way.
 
The Penguin Drop Caps edition is turquoise blue. Jessica Hische’s clever cover illustration is a mascara’d eye peering out through the centre of an O as through two curtains which form the vertical lines of an H, with the eye as its horizontal bar. The edges of the pages are stained blue and the contrasting colour on the spine is a deeper blue. The rubbery cover makes it a joy to hold while you read.