A knowing, nuanced #MeToo story from the world of corporate law, with juicy The Wolf of Wall Street–type action.
The perils and pleasures—if that’s the right word—of a high-powered young woman working as a first-year associate at a major Manhattan law firm.
One of the key sentences in this debut novel is in the author bio on the last page: “Erica Katz is the pseudonym for a graduate of Columbia Law School who began her career at a major Manhattan law firm.” Another is in the acknowledgments: “To everyone who sees ugly parts of themselves in these characters and wonders if I’m writing about them, I’m not. (But I am…).” Clearly the story of Alexandra Vogel’s life at Klasko & Fitch is grounded in experience and first-hand observation. It’s an intense, disturbing #MeToo story that takes the significant risk of making its main character neither innocent nor completely likable. The book opens with an excerpt from a transcript of a New York Supreme Court trial. The defendant is Gary Kaplan, whom we will come to know as the firm’s most important, powerful, and wealthy client. What the charge is, or exactly why Alex is called to testify in such detail about her experiences at the firm, will not be clear until very late in the book. Before that, we go with Alex on the wild ride that is an associate’s first year as she tries to impress the bigwigs in order to “match” with a desirable department. Towering above them all is Mergers and Acquisitions—the best, brightest, toughest, most important—so naturally Alex, a mega-achiever whose accomplishments include a world record in girls junior swimming, sets her sights on it. Almost immediately the furiously competitive situation changes her into something of a monster. Multiday work sessions alternate with exorbitant dining, drinking, and drugging, taking quite a toll on her relationships with her boyfriend and her parents. Meanwhile sexual tension is building between her and more powerful colleagues while her relationships with the few women in the firm are…poor. She doesn’t see the situation for what it is until late in the book, when nuance goes out the window; her awakening is rushed and less realistic than what’s gone before.
A knowing, nuanced #MeToo story from the world of corporate law, with juicy The Wolf of Wall Street–type action.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-06296-148-8
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.
What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?
In the first page and a half of her latest page-turner, bestselling Australian author Moriarty introduces a large cast of fascinating characters, all seated on a flight to Sydney that’s delayed on the tarmac. There’s the “bespectacled hipster” with his arm in a cast; a very pregnant woman; a young mom with a screaming infant and a sweaty toddler; a bride and groom, still in their wedding clothes; a surly 6-year-old forced to miss a laser-tag party; a darling elderly couple; a chatty tourist pair; several others. No one even notices the woman who will later become a household name as the “Death Lady” until she hops up from her seat and begins to deliver predictions to each of them about the age they’ll be when they die and the cause of their deaths. Age 30, assault, for the hipster. Age 7, drowning, for the baby in arms. Age 43, workplace accident, for a 42-year-old civil engineer. Self-harm, age 28, for the lovely flight attendant, who is that day celebrating her 28th birthday. Over the next 126 chapters (some just a paragraph), you will get to know all these people, and their reactions to the news of their demise, very well. Best of all, you will get to know Cherry Lockwood, the Death Lady, and the life that brought her to this day. Is it true, as she repeatedly intones on the plane, that “fate won’t be fought”? Does this novel support the idea that clairvoyance is real? Does it find a means to logically dismiss the whole thing? Or is it some complex amalgam of these possibilities? Sorry, you won’t find that out here, and in fact not until you’ve turned all 500-plus pages. The story is a brilliant, charming, and invigorating illustration of its closing quote from Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (we’re not going to spill that either).
A fresh, funny, ambitious, and nuanced take on some of our oldest existential questions. Cannot wait for the TV series.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2024
ISBN: 9780593798607
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: June 15, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2024
PERSPECTIVES
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.
An epic battle between good and evil with a mystic twist.
When she was 10, Vida visited a fortuneteller who presented her with two broadly different futures and prophesied that she’d be “a champion of the natural world and all its beauty.” Now Vida, raised by her late great-uncle Ogden in a remote cabin surround by the beauties of nature, has no fear of wild animals, including the wolves led by her friend Lupo. Taught by Ogden, Vida, who has a special talent for dredging up gemstones, makes a living by means of a placer mine in a nearby river on government land. Her lover, school principal and activist José Nochelobo, dies in what seems to be an accident but turns out to have been murder. Terrence Boschvark, a wealthy psychopath who’ll stop at nothing to develop some nearby land, is behind the evil doings near her home. Vida, certain that someone is watching her, patiently waits for him to show himself. When he does, he turns out to be deputy sheriff Nash Deacon, who accuses her of killing his cousin Belden Bead and demands that she surrender to him body and soul. Deacon plays a game of sexual terrorism with Vida, who watched his drug-dealing cousin die of a self-inflicted gunshot wound and buried him and his car with her uncle’s backhoe. Now she plans for Deacon to be next. Once she kills and buries Deacon and his car, Vida becomes the subject of a manhunt by Boschvark’s remorseless killers. The mystical forces within her lead her to a place of hope. With some help from two native people and a tracker hired to find her, she fights for her life.
A page-turning thriller that combines a touch of magic with deep love for the natural world.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781662500510
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2024
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