Publication Date: July 25, 2023
New York Times bestseller Laura Lippman tells the story of Amber Glass, desperately trying to get away from her tabloid past but compulsively drawn back to the city of her youth and the prom date who destroyed everything she was reaching for.
Amber Glass has spent her entire adult life putting as much distance as possible between her and her hometown of Baltimore, where she fears she will forever be known as “Prom Mom”—the girl who allegedly killed her baby on the night of the prom after her date, Joe Simpson, abandoned her to pursue the girl he really liked. But when circumstances bring Amber back to the city, she realizes she can have a second chance—as long as she stays away from Joe, now a successful commercial real estate developer, married to a plastic surgeon, Meredith, to whom he is devoted.
The problem is, Amber can’t stay away from Joe. And Joe finds that it’s increasingly hard for him to ignore Amber, if only because she remembers the boy he was and the man he said he was going to be. Against the surreal backdrop of 2020 and early 2021, the two are slowly drawn to each other and eventually cross the line they’ve been trying not to cross.
And then Joe asks Amber to help him do the unthinkable . . . and she must decide if she is willing to let their toxic and dangerous past repeat itself.
Aside from graduation, many high school memories center around one event. It’s the night when students in fancy dresses and tuxedos fill a room, and if they are lucky, it includes an after-party.
Author Laura Lippman uses that memorable event as a background for Prom Mom. However, instead of happy memories, it sets off a chain reaction of events that change the trajectory of a teen girl’s life.
More than two decades later, Amber Glass returns to Baltimore and her old neighborhood. It’s just a matter of time before she runs into Joe Simpson.
As an author known for delivering intricate plot twists, Lippman definitely achieves that in this story. Because the past and present are intertwined in alternating chapters, what happened at Prom (and the ensuing fallout) isn’t immediately evident.
However, as the story progresses, current-day Amber morphs from victim to aggressor. Meanwhile, Joe is caught up in a tangled web of infidelity that illustrates his comfort with lying.
If I could add a subtitle, it would center around consequences. While you might dodge accountability now, it will eventually catch up to you.
Prom Mom takes a terrible life-changing event and finally delivers a form of justice for a lovestruck teen girl after two decades.
Since Laura Lippman’s debut, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her “special, even extraordinary,” and Gillian Flynn wrote, “She is simply a brilliant novelist.” Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her teenager.
