"Once More from the Top" voted as the first fall read for the CBS New York Book Club
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Readers select "Once More from the Top" by Emily Layden As Club Calvi's next book
Ten thousand votes were cast to decide the first fall read for the CBS New York Book Club. You chose "Once More from the Top" by Emily Layden as the Readers' Choice.
The book is about a successful pop star who must confront the secrets of her past after the body of her childhood best friend, who disappeared when they were in high school, is found at the bottom of a lake.
In a video message to the book club, Layden described "Once More from the Top" as a mystery mixed with small town soap and music industry drama. You can read an excerpt below.
Now it's time to get your copy of the book, and read along with Club Calvi over the next four weeks.
We read books connected to the tristate area in their plots and/or authors. These books may have adult themes.
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"Once More from the Top" by Emily Layden
From the publisher: Everyone in America knows Dylan Read, or at least has heard her music. Since releasing her debut album her senior year of high school, Dylan's spent fifteen years growing up in the public eye. She's not only perfected her skills when it comes to lyrics and melody; she's also learned how to craft a public narrative that satisfies her fans, her label, and the media. In the circles of fame and celebrity in which she now travels, the careful maintenance of Dylan Read pop star is often more important than the songs themselves.
And so lots of people think they understand everything about Dylan Read. But what no one knows is the part of her origin story she has successfully kept hidden: her childhood best friend Kelsey vanished the year before Dylan became famous. Now, as Dylan's at the height of her career, Kelsey's body is found at the bottom of their hometown lake—forcing Dylan to reckon with their shared past, her friend's influence on her music, and whether there's more to their story than meets the eye.
Emily Layden lives in upstate New York.
"Once More from the Top" by Emily Layden (Hardcover) $20
Excerpt: "Once More from the Top" by Emily Layden
Chapter One
2022
Lake Tahawus is shaped like a long, jagged scratch. When I see her on a map I think of a bear claw slashing at a tent, tearing a curved tatter in the canvas. Thirty-five miles point to point and four hundred feet at her deepest, the lake was born millions of years ago when the glaciers crept from north to south over the land, carving great gashes in the earth. In time the angry, uneven slice that cuts a crooked y-axis through upstate New York filled with water and sediment and algae and fish and, eventually, the endless debris of human life: private camps, built by the railroad tycoons in the Gilded Age; KOAs and hiking trails; bait shops and gas stations; marinas and members-only clubs.
In Thompson Landing, where I grew up, we think of Tahawus as ours. We learn to swim in her shallows and work summer jobs as lifeguards and camp counselors and fishing guides. We keep her secrets-the trails to the best jumping rocks, which islands have the sandiest beaches, where the loons nest on the western shores-like our own.
She does not always repay the favor. This is how it was with Kelsey Copestenke's body.
It was Canadian tourists who found her, on a portaging trip across the islands. The article in the Post-Ledger doesn't say which of Kelsey's remains they discovered on the beach that afternoon-only that they were "partial"-but I learn from a quick google that when a body decays underwater the first pieces to break off are, typically, the extremities, and so it was most likely the delicate bones of a finger or a metatarsal that washed ashore. Although the details of the initial discovery are slim, the newspaper is meticulous in chronicling how the rest of Kelsey was found, later: the father-and-son duo called in from Seattle; the special sonar technology they use to trawl deep basins of water. There's even a diagram of a tiny action-figure person on a pixelated lake floor, arms spread wide like a crucifixion. Because of something called an "instinctive drowning response," a corpse usually descends chest-up, the father is quoted as saying, hits the bottom feetfirst, then falls backward, coming to rest in a winged position. "That's the image we look for on the sonar," he said, and held his arms out to a T. The writer explains how deep a lake must be to hold a body down, and how because the water in Tahawus is very cold and slightly alkaline, the remains were, in general, remarkably well-preserved for their age.
The victim went missing fifteen years ago, and the case of her disappearance had long gone cold. Kelsey Copestenke was a seventeen-year-old junior at George Thompson High School when she vanished, and a classmate-the article literally says this, and I don't blame the writer, not really, because including my name will invariably boost this floundering local paper's SEO performance, even if it makes it sound like this is my story and not the story of my dead best friend-and a classmate, he writes, of Diamond-selling and Grammy Award-winning singer-songwriter Dylan Read.
Chapter 2
2022
It's Sloane who sends me the article about Kelsey Copestenke's body. Every day, her two assistants comb the internet's chatter about me, sifting through forums and Google Alerts and social media for anything that might require our attention. Most days they flag a few posts on Twitter and Instagram that I could engage with if I wanted, because it long ago stopped feeling safe for me to riffle through my own notifications; very rarely is there legitimate news we don't already know about, and most mornings it's nonsense-"Hear Dylan Read's ex's unfiltered opinion on singer's new beau"; "Dylan Read's $900 Gucci Sweatshirt: Get the Look"; "Dylan Read records at Highway 61-fans think new music coming this year!" (In the last case-I'm caught exiting the studio downtown, we hadn't expected the paparazzi storm, thought I'd snuck in unnoticed-Sloane might scan the resulting photos, just to be sure there's none that someone could unfairly distort. I keep my eyes trained on the ground three feet in front of me, walk very carefully-you never know what they might say if I roll my ankle on a crack in the sidewalk. "Dylan Read Drunk at the Studio: Famed Good Girl Finally Gone Bad?")
The subject line of Sloane's email is news alert and the body of the message is simply Did you know this girl? I don't blame her for being so direct: First of all, Sloane's style is to cut straight to the chase, which is why I hired her; second of all, I understand that her default position is skepticism. The press will do anything to morph even the most tangential connections into something material; why would she think this story-sad as it may be-is any different from the usual grasping at straws?
I'm reading the article for the fourth time when Nick texts. Good morning, babe, he writes, followed by a selfie, shot unflatteringly from below, his green eyes wide and eyebrows raised.
We've been together for almost six years and I am still shy about sending him unflattering photos of my own. I reply with a heart-eyed emoji instead. How's set?
Behind schedule already . . .
It's 11 a.m. on the East Coast, where they're shooting Nick's adaptation in the Long Island purgatory that is neither Queens nor the Hamptons, an American stand-in for the exurbs he called home in Ireland. The series is based on his debut novel, a multigenerational family narrative about addiction. Its initial sales were average, but there's been a renewed interest in his back projects since Leesider sold two million copies, or maybe since we started dating.
When's your meeting? he asks.
Two hours.
Of course. Nothing in LA starts before 10.
This f****** city. Our shared refrain: LA is perfect; LA is impossible. We call the place in New York "Home," capital H, because it's the place I bought because of us and the place that feels most like ours, but the truth is we live nomadically. A career in entertainment means you go where the work is. I think I mind it-the travel, the distance, the lack of feeling settled-less than Nick does.
Good luck, Nick says. And just remember: if you can't make whatever the f*** you want, the rest of us don't stand a chance.
He's right that another artist in my position-with six number-one albums, eight Grammys, and a catalog valued at nearly half a billion dollars-might not feel the need for luck before a label listening session. Another artist might feel, by now, that the label's opinion is no longer relevant. They need me more than I need them.
But Nick knows that I don't see any professional obligation that way. He knows that I always feel like I have something to prove. I don't want to ignore the executive notes; I want to make something so good they don't have any. I love you, I type, and then click my phone to black.
When I lift my eyes from the screen my heart throttles into my throat. Kelsey Copestenke is tucked into the chair across the room, feet on the seat, knees to chest. She looks exactly as she did fifteen years ago: dark hair; pale, pore-less skin; that ovalish jaw, a little asymmetrical on the left side.
He seems sweet, she says, her amber eyes blazing. Why didn't you tell him about me?
Excerpted from ONCE MORE FROM THE TOP by Emily Layden. Copyright © 2024 by Emily Layden. Reprinted by permission of Mariner Books, an imprint HarperCollins Publishers.
