I read the first eighty pages of The Shampoo Effect in a single sitting, sitting on my fire escape with a glass of iced tea that went warm before I noticed. I wasn’t sure I liked it, honestly. The characters felt too comfortable, too insulated, too rich. But I kept turning pages anyway.
That’s the sneaky thing about Jenny Jackson’s second novel. It feels like a light summer romp for about fifty pages. Then you realize you’re holding your breath.
The setup is simple enough. Caroline Lash moves to the small Massachusetts coastal town of Greenhead and falls for Van Whittaker, a local with floppy hair and the personality of a golden retriever. Van runs with a tight group of childhood friends: Bailey, his on-again-off-again ex; Augusta, snobbish and old money; Fran, overwhelmed by her sons. Caroline wants to belong. She tries so hard, you almost wince.
Then Bailey discovers she’s pregnant with Van’s baby.
Just like that, Caroline becomes the outsider. The group closes ranks. And what she does next, in a mixture of fury and heartbreak, unravels decades of buried secrets.
But here’s the question that kept nagging at me: is Caroline the problem, or is she just the mirror?
I think Jackson would say it’s a bit of both.
Characters You Recognize More Than Like
The characters are the engine here. Caroline is ambitious and slightly calculating, but not cruel. She’s the kind of woman who tells herself she’s fine while slowly drowning. Van is frustratingly passive, the sort of man who lets women fight over him because he can’t bring himself to choose. Bailey is magnetic and selfish, the friend everyone forgives because she’s beautiful and damaged.
I didn’t like any of them, exactly. But I recognized them. That’s the trick.
The book shifts between multiple points of view, which gives you each character’s inner justification for their terrible decisions. Nobody is purely wrong. Nobody is purely right. They’re all just people in their mid-thirties, still acting like teenagers, still running on old scripts.
The core theme is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately: how friendship groups become ecosystems. They develop their own rules, their own silences, their own ways of not talking about the obvious. An outsider threatens that balance simply by existing.
Jackson calls it the “shampoo effect”—the second squirt of shampoo that produces oversized suds, like a big night of partying followed by a morning beer that gets you drunk again. It’s a metaphor for how old patterns repeat themselves, how the same drama cycles through a group until someone new forces a change.
The New England Setting Does Heavy Lifting
The New England setting does heavy lifting here. Greenhead feels specific and real: the marshes, the houseboats, the bars where everyone knows everyone. Jackson captures that particular wealthy New England vibe where people have money but pretend they don’t, where kayaking and beach cleanups are status symbols.
I’ll be honest though. The book has problems.
The stakes never feel truly high. Everyone has a safety net—trust funds, family money, houses they can crash in. When characters face consequences, they’re mild. The biggest scandal is a pregnancy, and even that gets handled without real wreckage. I kept waiting for something to truly explode, and it never quite did.
Some readers will find that frustrating. I did, at first. But then I realized that might be the point.
Real life is messy. Real friend groups don’t implode in dramatic fashion. People just drift, resent, forgive, and pretend. Jackson captures that quiet dysfunction with unsettling accuracy.
The book is funny in a dry, restrained way. The humor comes from observation, not punchlines. A character describing her husband’s parenting style as “supervising from a safe distance.” Another admitting she’s “too tired for a proper grudge.” It’s the kind of humor that lands because you’ve thought the same thing.
Who Should Read This and Who Should Skip It
Who should read this? People who liked Pineapple Street, obviously. Also anyone who’s ever been the new person in an established friend group. Anyone who’s watched old friends choose comfort over honesty. Anyone who’s wondered if the problem was them or the situation.
Who should skip it? If you need high stakes and dramatic consequences, look elsewhere. If you want characters who learn and grow in obvious ways, this isn’t that book. If wealthy people problems make you roll your eyes, this will test your patience.
What I learned, in the end, is something about belonging. Caroline wanted so badly to be part of something that she ignored the warning signs. The group wanted so badly to stay the same that they made an outsider the villain. Neither side is innocent. Neither side is entirely wrong.
The book won’t change your life. It won’t make you rethink your friendships. But it might make you feel slightly less alone in the messiness of your own.
I closed the book and sat on my fire escape for a while. The iced tea was still warm. I thought about my own friend group, the one I’ve had since college, the one where we still rehash the same arguments from ten years ago. The one where I’m probably the Caroline to someone else’s Bailey.
Everyone is, in their own way, slightly overwhelmed but determined to act like they’re absolutely fine.
That’s the line that got me. Because of course we are. Of course they are. That’s the shampoo effect, isn’t it? The same mess, the same suds, over and over, until someone new walks in and makes you look at it differently.
