The promotion is announced at a museum gala. Tessa Michels has worked at the same boutique ad agency for thirteen years, most of them at eighty hours a week, and she is close enough to the stage to hear her boss describe the new vice president of accounts as a guru who has stunned him since the first interview. Then he says the name, and it belongs to a twenty-three-year-old who joined in the spring and spends his mornings on the golf course. Her friends steer her out by the elbows. A truck hits a pothole and soaks the hem of her dress. By the time they reach the car, she has a plan. Book Club Confidential by Julie Hatcher is the story of that plan: for thirty days, Tessa and her two oldest friends will make only the choices the heroines of their favorite novels would make.
The Woman Who Made the Coffee
The pact is the hook, but the first real pleasure of the book is how specific Hatcher is about the invisible work that was holding Tessa’s office together. The morning after the gala she arrives at two minutes past eight instead of an hour early. The weekly meeting stalls because there is no coffee in the break room. Her boss asks who makes the coffee, and her new rival says her name as though she has dropped a ball, when fetching coffee was never in her job description. It is a tiny scene, and it does more to explain her than any amount of backstory.
From there Tessa starts drawing lines. She leaves at five. She stops apologizing in emails, or rather she recites the apology in her head and deletes it before sending, which Hatcher plays as both funny and painful. And she refuses to join a pitch team for an all-female brand that has been handed to a man who keeps calling the founders “girls”. And she sets a small trap for whoever has been lifting ideas from her brainstorm file, by moving it back onto the company network stuffed with deliberately ridiculous concepts. That payoff is one of the best laughs in Book Club Confidential by Julie Hatcher, and it lands because the book has taken the time to make office politics feel like weather.
What Hatcher gets right is that boundaries are not free. By the halfway point the pact has cost all three women something real, and the book lets that hurt for a while. Tessa’s slide into a week on the couch is handled with a frankness that will be familiar to anyone who has tied their worth to their output, and the novel is clear that what she had been calling ambition was edging toward burnout.
Her friends get their own arcs. Hallie is a chef with a bullying boss and a fiancé from an old-money family. Kate is an influencer whose income rests on a debutante persona she outgrew years ago. Both are good company, and Hallie in particular gets the most satisfying turn in Book Club Confidential by Julie Hatcher.
The comedy is better than the premise suggests. Tessa thinks in campaigns, so when she spots her handsome client outside a historic storefront she drafts a tourism slogan and then a cologne voiceover in his name before tripping on a broken paving slab. Her sabotage fantasies about the golf-loving rival rarely go further than a wedgie. It keeps a book about real disappointments from tipping into self-pity.
What Book Club Confidential Knows About Brothers
The thread that surprised us, and the one that lifts the book above a breezy comfort read, is Tessa’s family.
Her birth mother drank and drifted out of her life when she was small. Her father remarried when she was thirteen, and her stepmother died of breast cancer three years later, leaving him with a grieving twelve-year-old stepson and a daughter who decided, at sixteen, that the kindest thing she could do was need nothing. That stepbrother, Devin, has spent most of his adult life disappearing, crashing and coming home. Now he is back again, and her father wants a family dinner.
The dinner is the best extended scene in Book Club Confidential by Julie Hatcher. Rigatoni and fried chicken, her favorites. Tessa offers to open the wine, goes to the cabinet where bottles have always waited for family nights, and finds the shelves empty. Nobody has ever said the word addiction in that house before, and the empty cabinet says it for them. The mantra she uses to get through the evening, that she can love her brother and hate the way he has lived, is the closest thing the novel has to a thesis.
Hatcher is brave enough to let Tessa be wrong. Her suspicion of Devin is earned by years of disappointment, and it still misfires, and the book makes her own that. It builds toward a conversation with her father about which child got looked after when the family was grieving, and it is written with real restraint. If you take one thing from this novel to your own book club, take that scene.
Where Book Club Confidential Gives Ground
- The antagonists are drawn in one shade. The young rival steals ideas, runs up the company card and condescends to clients; the boss turns from mentor to bully in a single meeting; a future mother-in-law exists to sneer. None of them is allowed a reason.
- The office plot is explained rather than dramatized. The answers to why certain people were hired and why the boss has been behaving so strangely arrive late, in one sitting, as gossip over coffee. It is tidy and it is flat.
- Grant has no flaws to speak of. The former client who becomes Tessa’s love interest brings dinner, reads her business plan, offers money and waits patiently. He is lovely. He is also the least interesting person in the book, because there is nothing to resolve.
- The ending pays everyone. A novel whose first half argues persuasively that change costs something spends its last fifty pages handing out rewards, and the two-years-later coda of Book Club Confidential by Julie Hatcher ties every remaining bow.
Content Notes
What Book Club Confidential by Julie Hatcher carries, briefly. An alcoholic mother who vanished. A stepbrother’s addiction, rehab and recovery. A stepmother’s death from cancer, in the past. A parent’s medical emergency, on the page. Workplace sexism and intimidation. Intimate photos shared online without consent after a wardrobe malfunction. Heavy social drinking and frequent swearing. Heat level: closed door, kisses only.
Read These Next
Julie Hatcher is the name Julie Anne Lindsey, a Daphne du Maurier Award winner with more than sixty mystery and suspense novels behind her, uses for her warmer contemporary fiction. If Book Club Confidential by Julie Hatcher worked for you, start with her own backlist.
- Not Quite by the Book by Julie Hatcher, her previous novel, about a bookstore manager who retreats to a historic manor. Gentler and more conventionally romantic.
- Happy Place by Emily Henry for a friend group formed at college and a heroine pretending her life is fine.
- Book Lovers by Emily Henry for a career-first woman who has built her life around being the reliable one.
- The Deadly Book Club by Lyn Liao Butler if you would like your book club with a body count.
The Last Word
The novel is dedicated to book clubs that have become lifelines, and that is exactly what it is about. The romance is pleasant, the career plot is fun when it is being specific and thin when it is being resolved, but the reason to read Book Club Confidential by Julie Hatcher is three women on a group call at midnight, telling each other the truth and then showing up anyway.
Read it with the friends who would tell you to quit. Then argue about whether they were right.
