What a peculiar book in terms of what it is trying to tell us: rich people can be insensitive but they collapse under problems the same way that the rest of us do. They are people as well as being rich. Indeed but you don’t have to work for the idea and just following the lives of the young, rich adults is not really very interesting. It also tells us that their behaviour is also the behaviour of other classes, we just need to see it in ourselves. There is everything that money brings in this book – trusts, property, banking, wills, prenups and holding on to it all.

The family are white and privileged but married into it are a middle-class woman and a black man who feel like outsiders – sounds a bit like the royal family – with the family no idea about how they feel. It takes losing a job, a house on fire and the loss of a loved one for everybody to see their own faults and to make good on them.

The characters aren’t unlikable, apart from the mother, and this makes it all a little bland. I did finish it but probably only because I haven’t finished a couple of books recently and decided to make the effort with this one.

I don’t believe poor = good and wealthy = bad and I understand that they experience the same emotions as everyone else when dealing with loss of any kind. When you look at how COVID hit communities, it is those with less money, poor housing etc that suffered the most. It wasn’t those without money who made money during this time, but those with money. As the book says, the top 3 people have more wealth than the bottom 1/4 and whilst some of those people with wealth are philanthropists, the majority aren’t.

This book isn’t really strong enough to do anything other than be a bit of beach reading and please don’t tell me that you have to read it carefully so that you don’t miss the point. If you have to say that, it doesn’t really do its job. This is not Bonfire of the Vanities.