Emily Ever After [Paperback]

Anne Dayton (Author), May Vanderbilt (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 7, 2005

A quirky and quick-witted girl moves to Manhattan and holds on for dear life.

Emily Hinton needs out. She comes from a small town in California where the church handbell choir concert passes for a decent way to spend a Saturday and she’s known all the boys since kindergarten. She dreams of sophisticated people, love, and Louis Vuitton. When she lands a job at the world-famous publishing house Morrow & Sons in New York, she knows that she is finally on her way. She packs her bags, says good-bye, and sets out for Manhattan, where she will fit in, even if it kills her.

In spite of her naïveté, she quickly becomes friends with the girls at work and begins to learn a thing or two about how things are done in Manhattan. She soon attracts the attention of the handsome Bennett and is swept into a whirlwind romance, but an overnight visit to his parents’ home at Thanksgiving and his seemingly idle flirtations with one of her colleagues give her second thoughts about what Bennett really wants. Her uncertainty about her feelings escalates when one of the hometown boys she left behind reappears in her life. Emily’s days at the office are also becoming complicated: an ambitious editor is breaking all the rules to publish a controversial book that demeans everything she believes in. Will she stand up for what she knows is right and risk losing it all?

Balancing her passion for the glamour of New York City with her determination to live by her morals turns out to be much more difficult than Emily ever imagined. Her roundabout quest for happiness will endear her to anyone who has ever dreamed of making it big, and faced more than a few pitfalls along the way.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

When smalltown California native Emily Hinton lands an editorial assistant position at a "world-famous" publishing house, she hangs a Bible verse in her cubicle, vows not to get drunk on weekends and begins her quest to build a glamorous and Christian life in the Big Apple. Her first day results in a meet-cute with one of the company's only other Christians, putative "total goody-goody" Bennett Edward Wyeth III, and pretty soon Emily and Bennett are an item. Enter, via e-mail, her elementary school crush, Jacob, who writes cleverly charming missives even as Bennett's stock is falling because his faith starts to seem insincere. But Emily's own faith is never explored: isn't there more to religion than prohibitions against heavy petting and Jell-O shots? The only convincingly devout Christian around is Emily's uncle, Matthew, who runs a mission in Times Square. Emily natters on, never seeming spiritual so much as prissy and pious, and by the time things come to a head—Emily's boss considers publishing an anti–traditional marriage screed, and she must decide whether to protest or to stay quiet—most readers will have had enough of her.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

Emily Hinton longs to leave her hometown of Jenks, California, for the big city, specifically Manhattan. With the help of her uncle Matthew, she lands a job at Morrow & Sons as an editorial assistant. Although enchanted by the glamorous city, Emily is determined to hang on to her Christian values. She attends church and volunteers at her uncle's soup kitchen, but she also tries to fit in with the girls at work, who are decidedly wilder than Emily. She thinks she's found the perfect guy in Bennett, who also works at Morrow--he's clean-cut, handsome, attentive, and a Christian, but his motives for pursuing her might not be as pure as they first seem. As much as she loves life in New York, leaving Jenks behind isn't as easy as Emily thought; she misses her family, and Jacob, an old friend, is looking more attractive than any of the sleek New York guys around her. Dayton and Vanderbilt's charming offering will appeal to readers looking for a wholesome heroine navigating big-city life. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Broadway; 1ST edition (June 7, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0385514638
• ISBN-13: 978-0385514637
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (64 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,262,405 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars ???, October 17, 2007

By 

lulluli (Europe) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Emily Ever After (Paperback)

Disappointing. (I must have a new edition, because my cover DOES mention this a christian book though.)

The plot is really weak and confusing - and I personaly don't know of any christians who would advocate preventing people with other opinions from publishing their essays! What next?
I remained frustrated until the end that the Brittany plotline was never followed up, and felt most of the secondary characters to be underdeveloped.

The student/young professional lifestyle is well described. And the absence of God in everyday life balanced by the occasional outbursts of moralism and choice of 2 or 3 stereotypical "causes" (no sex before marriage, drinking) as representive of what the christian should and shouldn't be like, is unfortunately an exact reflection of the typical "backslidden" city christian of today.
i.e. the priorities are all wrong - it's quite unfortunate that a whole chunk of christianity today apparently sees no sex no drink as the substance, rather than one of many symptoms of the christian life. It's no surprise that these people whose faith lacks depth (including Emily in the book) often find themselves playing with the borders.
It begs the question - have the authors got beyond that stage themselves?

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Refreshing Chick-lit, August 30, 2005

By 

A. Gibble "goldenparadox" - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Emily Ever After (Paperback)

Like many reviewers, I was unaware of the part that Christinaity played in the book. I, myself, am a Christian and found the book refreshing, although a bit cliche. Although Christianity played a part, I didn't find it preachy. I thought it gave a honest look at the naivety that many Christians have. Other than that, it was standard chick-lit, except for no bad language or sex. It was a taste of old-fashioned refreshing that was enjoyable.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars One of these authors is pretty cool, the other's painful, August 7, 2007

By 

Emma Peelout "emma peelout" (Indianapolis) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Emily Ever After (Paperback)

This book seemed slightly schizophrenic to me, and I kept wondering if the two authors split up the writing duties "I'll take the first half, you take the second."
The first half was a fun, lighthearted chick-lit story with a refreshingly nice, grounded heroine. It's similar to a book I enjoyed much more by these two authors, "The Book of Jane."
In the second half, let the moralizing and judging begin. We get harangues (from her friend) about how Emily's "values" are wrong because she drinks alcohol and even eats out in restaurants! To her credit, Emily does at least disagree with that, but the friend still plays the role of her conscience. Then, after bragging about how non-judgmental she is, Emily sneers at a friend who is dating a bartender. ("Appalling standards," she calls them). She doesn't know anything about this girl, mind you, other than that she is a bartender, not an "amazing" girl like Emily herself. What a shallow little snob.
Emily also (reluctantly) allows her parents to call her boyfriend's parents to check on the sleeping arrangements when she goes to stay in the family home for Thanksgiving! This is a college graduate! My parents are about as conservative as it gets but no way would they be interfering like that. This is the point at which Emily begins to seem like pious 12-year-old.
It all implodes in a frenzy of clueless self-righteousness (and I'm a Christian, mind you) when Emily makes "the right decision" to suppress a book whose ideas she doesn't agree with. The answer to "bad ideas" is "more ideas" -- if you don't agree with something, present your argument as to why. But given the way Emily's desperate squelching of ideas is presented as heroic, the finale seemed downright fascist.