So much fun, and educational too.
Corporate sexism and the mortgage crisis are a laugh a minute...in this delightful comic novel, at least.
Belle Cassidy is a managing director at an investment banking firm called Feagin Dixon— she makes $700,000 a year plus an end-of-year bonus for 2007 that comes in just under $3 million. Sure, the money is great, but Belle is also a member of the Glass Ceiling Club—a group of women who have organized secretly to talk about the raging sexism of their work environment. This entails everything from ass-grabbing to frat-style office parties to the exclusion of women from top-level decision-making, including the risk management committee—a real-life fact which, according to former investment banker Sherry (Walls Within Walls, 2010), is at least partly responsible for the subprime mortgage disaster of 2008. In chapters with titles like "Herd on the Street," "Gentlemen Prefer Bonds," and "Dais of the Dicks," she evokes this luxurious yet disgusting world in juicy detail, from a mandatory softball game at a 15-acre estate in "Hedgistan, the area between New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut, where most hedge fund managers live," to the weekly chapel session at "a preschool so elite it had no name on the door, no website, no listing in the phone book," where "the billionaires sit along the front sides of the room" avoiding the "annoying millionaire parents who are pining for a playdate." To get her kids into this school, Belle has had to call in a favor from her ex-fiance, Henry Thomas Wilkins III, who soon turns up in her working life as a key player at one of her major clients. Good thing her husband, Bruce, a hunky, big-spending, nonworking dad, isn't the jealous type. While she's making you laugh, Sherry does an excellent job of explaining what exactly happened in the financial crisis and gives a rare picture of the wide range of ways women in the workplace deal with chauvinism, some as heroes, some as victims, and some as opportunists.
So much fun, and educational too.Pub Date: Feb. 2, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-5011-1062-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Oct. 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2015
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.
Eleven years ago, he broke her heart. But he doesn’t know why she never forgave him.
Toggling between past and present, two love stories unfold simultaneously. In the first, Macy Sorensen meets and falls in love with the boy next door, Elliot Petropoulos, in the closet of her dad’s vacation home, where they hide out to discuss their favorite books. In the second, Macy is working as a doctor and engaged to a single father, and she hasn’t spoken to Elliot since their breakup. But a chance encounter forces her to confront the truth: what happened to make Macy stop speaking to Elliot? Ultimately, they’re separated not by time or physical remoteness but by emotional distance—Elliot and Macy always kept their relationship casual because they went to different schools. And as a teen, Macy has more to worry about than which girl Elliot is taking to the prom. After losing her mother at a young age, Macy is navigating her teenage years without a female role model, relying on the time-stamped notes her mother left in her father’s care for guidance. In the present day, Macy’s father is dead as well. She throws herself into her work and rarely comes up for air, not even to plan her upcoming wedding. Since Macy is still living with her fiance while grappling with her feelings for Elliot, the flashbacks offer steamy moments, tender revelations, and sweetly awkward confessions while Macy makes peace with her past and decides her future.
With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affair.Pub Date: April 10, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5011-2801-1
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Gallery Books/Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Jan. 22, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2018
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