An engaging depiction of the challenges that face businesswomen.
Two strong women take on the high finance world of Silicon Valley in Cameron’s debut novel.
San Francisco venture capitalist Ryn Brennan discovers that Todd, her successful real-estate agent husband of 10 years, has been having an affair with someone nicknamed “Carly-bear.” It turns out to be Carly Santos, the co-founder and chief scientist of BioLarge, a health tech startup in which Ryn’s firm is about to invest. Carly, the 35-year-old single mother of a 5-year-old, is innocently planning her wedding to Todd, whom she thinks is a widower. Ryn reels from Todd’s betrayal and soon comes to understand he’s been lying to both his wife and his unwitting mistress. The two women come to forge a connection, with Ryn serving as a mentor, professional ally, and close friend to Carly, who has an unusual backstory; she stole from her parents’ church fund and ran away with her boyfriend at 15. She also carries a visible symbol of her chaotic past: an arm-length tattoo of a gun, a bleeding skull, and butterflies. Removing it would be difficult, she realizes: “Just like her past, it would still have been there, transformed into ghost scars.” Alternating chapters reflect Carly and Ryn’s viewpoints, respectively, and each woman emerges as believable and sympathetic. The well-crafted narrative sizzles with tense, relatable, and realistic scenes involving a dreaded call from a child’s school during an important meeting, unwanted advances from co-workers, and the ongoing struggle for respect in the boardroom. Although Todd comes off as a somewhat stereotypical villain, other characters are intriguing, such as Carly’s entrepreneur friend Dev and Ryn’s assistant, Keisha,a talented young woman who confronts sexism and racism in the workplace. Throughout, readers will root for these women’s success.
An engaging depiction of the challenges that face businesswomen.Pub Date: July 8, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5092-3138-6
Page Count: 386
Publisher: The Wild Rose Press
Review Posted Online: June 25, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Uneven but fitfully amusing.
Betrayed by her husband, a severely depressed young woman gets drawn into the over-the-top festivities at a lavish wedding.
Phoebe Stone, who teaches English literature at a St. Louis college, is plotting her own demise. Her husband, Matt, has left her for another woman, and Phoebe is taking it hard. Indeed, she's determined just where and how she will end it all: at an oceanfront hotel in Newport, where she will lie on a king-sized canopy bed and take a bottle of her cat’s painkillers. At the hotel, Phoebe meets bride-to-be Lila, a headstrong rich girl presiding over her own extravagant six-day wedding celebration. Lila thought she had booked every room in the hotel, and learning of Phoebe's suicidal intentions, she forbids this stray guest from disrupting the nuptials: “No. You definitely can’t kill yourself. This is my wedding week.” After the punchy opening, a grim flashback to the meltdown of Phoebe's marriage temporarily darkens the mood, but things pick up when spoiled Lila interrupts Phoebe's preparations and sweeps her up in the wedding juggernaut. The slide from earnest drama to broad farce is somewhat jarring, but from this point on, Espach crafts an enjoyable—if overstuffed—comedy of manners. When the original maid of honor drops out, Phoebe is persuaded, against her better judgment, to take her place. There’s some fun to be had here: The wedding party—including groom-to-be Gary, a widower, and his 11-year-old daughter—takes surfing lessons; the women in the group have a session with a Sex Woman. But it all goes on too long, and the humor can seem forced, reaching a low point when someone has sex with the vintage wedding car (you don’t want to know the details). Later, when two characters have a meet-cute in a hot tub, readers will guess exactly how the marriage plot resolves.
Uneven but fitfully amusing.Pub Date: July 30, 2024
ISBN: 9781250899576
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: Sept. 13, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
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