Excerpt from A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

True, it hadn't been a banner day, starting with her mother showing up late to Nina's graduation after Nina and the other graduates had already marched down the aisle and up onto the stage in their floor-length white dresses, where they sat in rows of folding chairs, looking, she imagined, like a choir of virgin sacrifices—as if she needed another reminder of her status. For weeks, her mother's depression had been heavier and angrier than usual, with Nina and her father taking turns as targets. They hadn't been sure she'd show up today at all, and Nina couldn't say she was happy she had, watching the commotion of her entrance, Frances bumping and swerving down the row where Ira had saved her a seat just in case, inexplicably dressed in an argyle sweater and gray flannel skirt even though it was ninety degrees outside. People craned their necks as her mother kicked a man's leg and hissed that he'd tried to trip her.

"Who is that?" Polly Jessup, seated beside Nina, had asked, but Nina just shrugged, so tense her shoulders got stuck up by her ears.

During the headmistress's speech, her mother had squatted with her camera in the aisle, hollering Nina's name like a crazed paparazza (Ohhh, Polly said, inching away) until, lightheaded from Nardil or Darvon, she lost her balance and toppled backward onto her butt. At the reception, she'd raged at the bartender over too many ice cubes in her cranberry juice and then threw one at Ira when he tried to shush her. When Nina tried to intervene, her mother slung what was left of her drink at her, splashing the white commencement dress scarlet.

But at least razor-blade-wielding thugs hadn't ambushed Nina on the way home from the reception. She could walk into Flanagan's tonight without a face full of stitches. And in even better news: eighty-six days, ten hours, and twenty-eight minutes until she finally, blessedly, left for Vanderbilt. Not her first choice, but her top picks had rejected her, maybe because she'd mistakenly checked "Native American" as her ethnicity on the applications. For some reason—she couldn't rule out the shots of her father's vodka she'd consumed while she filled them out—she'd honestly thought Native American meant "born in America," and "Caucasian" somewhere in Asia. The applications were already in the mail to Brown and Georgetown before she realized her mistake. But the silver lining was that Vanderbilt wouldn't be crawling with New Yorkers: she hoped to bask in the prestige surely afforded a girl from the Manhattan at a college in the Deep South.

As she crossed the lobby toward the door, she heard what sounded like belly-dancing music—cymbals and sitars and a man's tremulous wail—coming from the doorman's transistor radio. The doormen weren't supposed to play music while on duty, but she secretly liked the idea of his music seeping into the walls of her uptight apartment building, the echo of thrusting hips and hookah pipes rattling the sugar scions and Daughters of the Revolution who'd barely let the Jacobs family past the co-op board ten years before. Nina still wasn't sure why her parents so badly wanted to live here. Yes, it was an elegant building in a desirable neighborhood, but how elegant and desirable could Ira and Frances feel when, even now, the co-op board president, Carter Lorillard, insisted on greeting them in the lobby as "the Jewish Jacobses," as in, "Always good to see the Jewish Jacobses," or "How are the Jewish Jacobses this evening?" Nina had yet to hear him greet "the Episcopalian Sloanes," or ask "the Catholic Ryans" how they were doing.

The doorman came back inside from fetching a taxi for a tenant. Freddie was in his thirties, lived in a basement apartment in the Bronx, and dreamt about opening a car wash one day. He gave her a wet-lipped grin as he approached. Nina's father had once told her that he'd escaped some godforsaken country where half his family was still locked away in the bowels of a medieval government prison. His history made her stomach clench, but so did he.

Excerpted from A Gorgeous Excitement by Cynthia Weiner. Copyright © 2025 by Cynthia Weiner. Excerpted by permission of Crown. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.