All We Ever Wanted Was Everything (Spiegel & Grau) by Janelle Brown is an explosive glimpse behind closed doors at the Silicon Valley’s set of the suddenly-Nouveau-Riche. The satirical hit novel is now in paperback, just in time for beach season!

It is a mental portrait of the three Miller women; each affected in her own way by growing up in ritzy, yet vicious Santa Rita during the dot-com rush. The downward spiral begins on the morning when Janice Miller’s husband rakes in over $300 million from his IPO…and then leaves her. Margaret, stoic and determined to live freely from the upbringing she despised, is broke after launching a feminist magazine in Los Angeles, and to add insult to injury, her newly-minted movie-star boyfriend just left her. Lizzie is fourteen, chubby, and suddenly branded the freshman slut.

What’s a Miller girl to do? Well, convene in the family Georgian house and deal with the residual backlash. At first, we were concerned that this would be cliché “fluff.” But Brown manages to steer the drama away from the country club and deeply into the Millers’ minds. Brown is flawlessly adept at stream of consciousness - which is ultimately her greatest narrative technique; along with razor-sharp class satire, of course.