The Daydreams

Hankin (The Summertime Girls) delivers a sparkling story of lasting friendships amid the pitfalls of celebrity culture. Summer, Noah, Liana, and Kat starred on the smash teen TV show The Daydreams, about a pop music group of the same name, which imploded during a devastating live show 13 years earlier after Summer’s journal was leaked to the press (the details of the leak, and its implications, are teased out over the course of the narrative). After rumors of a reunion circulate on Twitter, the show’s former stars are asked by the network to get back together. Kat’s now a D.C.-based lawyer; Noah, a bona fide Hollywood star; Liana, trophy wife to a sports star; and the Britneyesque Summer, whose star has been marred by several trips to rehab. Kat, who’s on a partner track, is reluctant. Soon, though, she’s pulled back into the drama and unfinished business she’d left more than a decade earlier. The cascading revelations behind the leak of Summer’s journal, complete with an unexpected series of betrayals, will hit readers like a ton of bricks. Hankin keeps the plot tight and the flawed characters sympathetic—even the villain. Readers won’t want to put this down. Agent: Stefanie Lieberman, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May)