If you're heading out on vacation soon --- or even if you’re doing more of a staycation --- THE SHAMPOO EFFECT just begs to be part of your summer reading plans this year. It's not just that delightfully beachy cover (though that certainly helps set the mood). Jenny Jackson's second novel offers the perfect blend of substance and style, all served up with plenty of small-town scandal.

Much as she did with family dynamics in her bestselling debut, PINEAPPLE STREET, here Jackson explores the interwoven and often messy relationships among a tight-knit friend group as they enter the morass of early middle age. What's interesting is that Jackson initially introduces readers to the couples --- all of which have members who grew up and still live in the fictional coastal Massachusetts town of Greenhead --- through the eyes of an outsider like themselves.

"THE SHAMPOO EFFECT just begs to be part of your summer reading plans this year.... Jenny Jackson's second novel offers the perfect blend of substance and style, all served up with plenty of small-town scandal."

Caroline Lash has no particular connection to Greenhead or its inhabitants. After publishing a short story in The New Yorker and impulsively quitting her publishing job in New York City, she has accepted a seemingly open-ended writing fellowship sponsored by the estate of famous author Palmer Preston, which comes with a beach cottage where Preston himself penned many of his award-winning novels. For Caroline, this is an opportunity not only to reinvent herself as a literary novelist but also to get out from behind the shadow of her mother, Gwendolyn, a bestselling author of genre fiction whose fame looms over all of Caroline's publishing industry interactions.

On the train up to Greenhead, Caroline has a meet-cute (or a meet-gross, depending on your interpretation) with handsome Van Whittaker. Over the course of Caroline's first few weeks in Greenhead, the environmental scientist introduces her to his circle of friends. 

They include couples Augusta and Colin (whose relationship has become increasingly strained amid long-simmering family tensions), as well as Fran and RJ (who take turns self-medicating with alcohol, cannabis and shrooms in order to cope with the boredom of caring for small children and the stress of money troubles that are plaguing Fran's family). They also include Van's longtime on-again, off-again girlfriend. The stunningly gorgeous Bailey is now firmly single and --- as she reveals just as Caroline is feeling acclimated in her own new relationship with Van --- pregnant with Van's baby. 

What seems like a novel focused primarily on Caroline's outsider status begins to expand and deepen as it delves into chapters from the other women's points of view, revealing their complexities, insecurities and secrets. This all comes to a head after Caroline, who is disillusioned with the changes in her romance with Van, commits what the friend group considers to be the ultimate betrayal. Will this upstart writer tear the friends apart or bring them closer together?

Fans of John Updike (or even those who reluctantly were assigned his work in class or book club) likely will recognize his influence here even without Jackson's afterword acknowledging the ways in which her book is in conversation with his novels about suburban secrets and intrigue. The beachy setting also is clearly based on Updike's longtime home of Ipswich, Massachusetts. But Jackson chooses to name her fictional town after the bloodsucking flies that painfully torment unsuspecting tourists who make the mistake of visiting its shores at the wrong time of year. Coincidence? Almost certainly not, and that's just one of the delightfully thoughtful details that abound throughout these pages.

THE SHAMPOO EFFECT is an ideal summer novel, dishy but deep, and it even has a hint at a happily ever after --- or as close as we're going to get in Greenhead.