All We Ever Wanted by Emily Giffin

It is so ironic reading this in the aftermath of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings last week (I am still wearing black).  Griffin is an author that is well and truly chick lit, so while I see it as a step above my usual murder mystery fare, it is not what I would call a giant step up, let’s put it that way.  In this one Nina is slowly but surely coming to the realization that this is not her beautiful life.  Her son, Fitch, who had everything going for him, is caught with a photo of a semi-conscious partly naked woman on his phone that has a modestly racist epitaph scrawled across it.
What to do?  Nina’s husband is all for covering it up.  It is no big deal.  He didn’t mean anything by it.  The usual it didn’t happen and if it did happen then it was no big deal. Nina, who was date raped in college and on some level it changed the whole rest of her life, feels differently.  She is worried about the young woman involved, and thinks that it is very appropriate that he go through the disciplinary process of his school.  In the end, the boy is found to be far from honorable, the father demonstrates that that acorn didn’t fall far from the tree, but in a classic this would never happen in real life, the women prevail.