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Sebastian Ritscher
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GRADUATES IN WONDERLAND

Rachel Kapelke-Dale Jessica Pan

The International Misadventures of Two (Almost) Adults

GRADUATES IN WONDERLAND is a hilarious, relatable, and honest epistolary memoir told in alternating emails between two college best friend as they navigate adulthood.
Jessica Pan and Rachel Kapelke-Dale’s epistolary memoir tells the story of their first five years post-college as they span the globe between New York, Beijing, Paris, and Melbourne, Australia. Fast friends since their first year at Brown University in 2003, Jess and Rachel resolved to keep in touch weekly through in-depth—and brutally honest—emails about their lives as they graduated and prepared to move across the world from each other. At once aspirational and relatable, Graduates in Wonderland provides an unflinching portrait of what growing up looks like today through Rachel and Jess’s wry, self-aware, and sometimes painfully earnest first-person voices. Our heroines’ paths showcase two extremes of post-collegiate life: Rachel moves to New York and starts paying dues at the bottom of the employment ladder, while Jess explores the world, searching for love and success without knowing how to find it. Continents apart, Jess and Rachel tackle their entry into the real world together, sharing their successes, their stumbles, and their hopes and fears for the future. They swap tales of out-of-control bosses and cringe-worthy details of dating misadventures, along with the hard stuff they faced after college, from car accidents and taxes to break-ups and break-downs. Over the course of their irreverent, hilarious, yet deeply genuine emails, Jess and Rachel share an inside glimpse of intimate conversation between two best friends as they come-of-age and grow into the women they are meant to become. Jessica Pan has a BA in Psychology and Literary Arts from Brown University. She holds a master’s degree in journalism from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. She was the editor of a magazine and a TV reporter in Beijing and has written for The Hairpin and The Toast. Rachel Kapelke-Dale is pursuing a PhD in cinematographic studies at University College London. She has a BA in History of Art and Architecture and Comparative Literature from Brown University and a master’s in Cinema Studies from the Université de Paris VII. Both authors live in London.
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Published 2014-05-01 by Gotham

Comments

Sounding, thinking, and talking exactly like your best friends, these girls dive headfirst into the humor and heartache of life after college. They kiss a lot of foreign frogs in a lot of foreign cities. And just when they think they are in danger of becoming real live adults, they prove themselves spectacularly wrong. And I love them for it.

I loved Graduates in Wonderland. It made me nostalgic for the uncertainty and excitement and seemingly endless possibilities of the post-college years. The first thing I did after reading it was pour my heart out--via email, of course--to my best friend.

Rachel and Jess have done an extraordinary job, in the creation of this book, of turning an epistolary life story into something richly tender, and genuinely suspenseful. The intimacy here, is not just between the writers, but with the readers. I've adventured forth now with Jess and Rachel, and I have returned with a warm, good feeling in my heart.

I knew from page 8, on which one of the authors ends a letter with a piece of brutally honest advice about the other's crush, that I would love Graduates in Wonderland. Theirs is a best friendship I find as complex, challenging, and deeply intimate as my own—the type of dynamic, all-consuming female friendship story that is as common as it is under-told. Jess and Rachel are smart, funny, and wise, and it's a pleasure to be like a fly in their emails, if that were a thing.

A female buddy book with intergenerational appeal.

Gloriously addictive. This book is like catching up with your best friends over two-dollar tacos and margaritas, trying to convince each other to date this guy or travel or buy weirdo heels. I've been there, babes! The two authors have perfectly captured a time in your life where you have no footing and everything is utter chaos...but at least you have your buddies. A warm breath of both nostalgia and reality. The kind of writing you eat with a spoon. Funny and sweet and honest, like the best kinds of friendships. Will recommend to all my ladies.

A charming epistolary tale of female friendship and early post-graduate life in all its exciting and confusing glory. Jess and Rachel’s adventures will be relatable to anyone who has ventured down that strange rabbit hole we call the 'real world' and wondered just how to find her way back out again in one successful, happy piece.

... the tight and supportive bond of their female friendship comes through.