Isabel Rose

Isabel Rose is a summa cum laude graduate of Yale and received an MFA in fiction from Bennington College. She has written several screenplays, and she cowrote the 2003 release Anything But Love, in which she also starred. Rose also entertains regularly on the New York City night club circuit with her nine-piece band. She is currently working on her second novel. Visit her website here.

THE J.A.P. CHRONICLES (2006)

Sex and the City meets Jane Austen in a wickedly funny, razor-sharp novel about the fortunes and misfortunes, expectations and regrets of seven women who shared long-ago summers at an elite Jewish girls’ camp. 

Anyone who’s ever wondered what happened to the girls in the exclusive cliques of adolescence will delight in The J.A.P. Chronicles. With the wry wit and keen eye and ear of a latter-day Jane Austen, Isabel Rose (herself a scion of a prominent New York family) provides the ultimate insider’s look at the glamorous upper-crust society that even Carrie Bradshaw would give her Jimmy Choos to join. 

When seven former bunkmates at Willow Lake Camp reunite for the camp’s one hundredth anniversary, the event brings more than just a revival of the old camp spirit. Ali Cohen, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker and former camp outcast, plans to make a documentary about her former bunkmates. The ugly duckling turned successful self-made swan secretly hopes that that her teenage tormentors will have grown into adult losers.

As each woman steps into focus, however, it becomes clear that it is not quite that simple. Sure, Arden can’t keep a job (even as a nanny!), Jessica is stuck in regional theater, and Dafna has lost both her job and her $20,000 per month stipend from her father. But Laura is apparently flourishing as a Los Angeles superagent, and Beth has found happiness by throwing over her dull but successful fiancé for her wedding photographer. Even Wendy, golden girl turned Short Hills housewife, has managed to skirt around old regrets and long-stifled urges—until seeing an old acquaintance stirs them up again.

Funny, smart, and ultimately moving, The J.A.P. Chronicles opens a whole new perspective on the girls from the “best families” and on the money, culture, and expectations that define their lives.

Rose, co-author and star of Anything But Love, pens her first novel, a cross between Candace Bushnell and Jane Austen. “Glittery, and surprisingly gritty, good fun.”—Kirkus

Vogue summer reading pick, 2006.

“What happens to Mean Girls, and the girls they are mean to, when they grow up? Isabel Rose takes a group of young girls to summer camp and then on to neurotic adulthood, to answer these questions in a fast, fun and furious read.”—Rona Jaffe, author of The Best of Everything

“A guilty pleasure.”—New York Magazine

Rights: Doubleday, North America