When 18 year-old Milana's Dad gets placed in Shanghai to run McIntyre & Co., a multinational consulting firm, she is thrown into a distinctly adult (and distinctly more privileged) world where she has her own driver, maid, accounts at the best bars and restaurants in the city, not to mention new friends with diplomatic immunity and seemingly limitless credit cards. Shanghai makes the Upper East Side look like kindergarten: status, looks, society and money count for everything, and everyone is jostling for top spot. Against this backdrop Milana is introduced to the Shanghai Sorority, the most exclusive club in the city, headed up by Chanel Zheng, the Eurasian daughter of Shanghai's most prominent business owner, pegged as communist party favorite for the first woman President of China. The Shanghai Sorority is the ultimate in the city's private, unofficial clubs; a sisterhood of extreme wealth and drastic loyalty. But then things go terribly wrong: it seems that there are opportunists in this world of riches as much as there are supporters, and suddenly, events beyond Milana's control begin to undermine her status as a Princess of Pudong, Shanghai, ultimately threatening her own younger sister's fragile innocence. Milana finds she must use all her intellect to carefully fight, manipulate, cajole and play the people around her who call themselves her friends in order to protect herself and rise up from the threat of being exposed and humiliated.