A well-crafted instructional tale that explores gender in corporate America.
An aging CEO tries to stem the flow of female talent away from her California company in this novel.
Debra is the co-founder and CEO of a Santa Monica–based tech firm. Sales are down, and people are jumping ship, including her star CPO, Natalie. Debra knows how hard the business world can be for women, but at age 60, she’s afraid she may be losing touch: “Debra had been feeling for some time that there was a generational gap; that she didn’t understand the concerns raised by some of the rising senior women….Natalie was the fourth senior woman in the past year to depart. The other three had also been on the younger side of the leadership team.” It’s especially frustrating for Debra because she’s worked so hard to promote women to leadership positions. Things don’t improve when Debra passes over Natalie’s preferred successor, Amber, senior director of product development, to bring in a man from the outside. Sales continue to fall. Debra can sense a crisis brewing, but she doesn’t know how to stop it. There is more holding back the young women around her than a simple lack of confidence—more than can just be solved by “leaning in.” To figure out how to save the company, Debra will have to listen to the young women still around: people like the frustrated Amber, who is secretly scheduling interviews; Debra’s new mentee, Cassandra, with whom she’s struggling to click; and even Kyle, a younger male manager who sees the flaws of many of his male colleagues. But can an old dog like Debra learn new tricks, even ones she wants to learn? Can she turn around her company before her investors rebel? Written with the express purpose of dramatizing the issues that many companies face concerning female engagement and leadership representation, the book attempts to get at the problems that persist despite the fact that everyone seems to want to solve them.
Ho’s prose is subtle and taut, as here, where she describes a tense work lunch: “Amber’s hands were beneath the table, but she was studying the menu as if it were the most riveting laminated sheet in the world. Her eyes were currently fixed on the meats page, even though she was a vegetarian. Sometimes Debra wished it didn’t always fall on her to break the ice in uncomfortable situations.” The story isn’t so compelling that it would satisfy readers with no interest in restructuring a corporate work environment, but it is much better than it has to be. For a novel with such overtly didactic purposes, the interpersonal dramas are well drawn and compelling. The author captures the way that colleagues interact: invariably polite on the surface while simmering underneath. What’s more, it makes Ho’s points in a way that a normal, prescriptive work of nonfiction could not. The characters easily embody the various perspectives, and they help readers see the situation from outside the blinkered viewpoint of a CEO. The result is an engaging evolution of Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” mantra.
A well-crafted instructional tale that explores gender in corporate America.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2021
ISBN: 978-1-95-410600-0
Page Count: 348
Publisher: Strategic Imagination
Review Posted Online: April 28, 2021
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.
Bearing witness to oppression.
Award-winning journalist and MacArthur Fellow Coates probes the narratives that shape our perception of the world through his reports on three journeys: to Dakar, Senegal, the last stop for Black Africans “before the genocide and rebirth of the Middle Passage”; to Chapin, South Carolina, where controversy erupted over a writing teacher’s use of Between the World and Me in class; and to Israel and Palestine, where he spent 10 days in a “Holy Land of barbed wire, settlers, and outrageous guns.” By addressing the essays to students in his writing workshop at Howard University in 2022, Coates makes a literary choice similar to the letter to his son that informed Between the World and Me; as in that book, the choice creates a sense of intimacy between writer and reader. Interweaving autobiography and reportage, Coates examines race, his identity as a Black American, and his role as a public intellectual. In Dakar, he is haunted by ghosts of his ancestors and “the shade of Niggerology,” a pseudoscientific narrative put forth to justify enslavement by portraying Blacks as inferior. In South Carolina, the 22-acre State House grounds, dotted with Confederate statues, continue to impart a narrative of white supremacy. His trip to the Middle East inspires the longest and most impassioned essay: “I don’t think I ever, in my life, felt the glare of racism burn stranger and more intense than in Israel,” he writes. In his complex analysis, he sees the trauma of the Holocaust playing a role in Israel’s tactics in the Middle East: “The wars against the Palestinians and their Arab allies were a kind of theater in which ‘weak Jews’ who went ‘like lambs to slaughter’ were supplanted by Israelis who would ‘fight back.’” Roiled by what he witnessed, Coates feels speechless, unable to adequately convey Palestinians’ agony; their reality “demands new messengers, tasked as we all are, with nothing less than saving the world.”
A revelatory meditation on shattering journeys.Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2024
ISBN: 9780593230381
Page Count: 176
Publisher: One World/Random House
Review Posted Online: Aug. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change.
Artist and activist Vaid-Menon demonstrates how the normativity of the gender binary represses creativity and inflicts physical and emotional violence.
The author, whose parents emigrated from India, writes about how enforcement of the gender binary begins before birth and affects people in all stages of life, with people of color being especially vulnerable due to Western conceptions of gender as binary. Gender assignments create a narrative for how a person should behave, what they are allowed to like or wear, and how they express themself. Punishment of nonconformity leads to an inseparable link between gender and shame. Vaid-Menon challenges familiar arguments against gender nonconformity, breaking them down into four categories—dismissal, inconvenience, biology, and the slippery slope (fear of the consequences of acceptance). Headers in bold font create an accessible navigation experience from one analysis to the next. The prose maintains a conversational tone that feels as intimate and vulnerable as talking with a best friend. At the same time, the author's turns of phrase in moments of deep insight ring with precision and poetry. In one reflection, they write, “the most lethal part of the human body is not the fist; it is the eye. What people see and how people see it has everything to do with power.” While this short essay speaks honestly of pain and injustice, it concludes with encouragement and an invitation into a future that celebrates transformation.
A fierce, penetrating, and empowering call for change. (writing prompt) (Nonfiction. 14-adult)Pub Date: June 2, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-593-09465-5
Page Count: 64
Publisher: Penguin Workshop
Review Posted Online: March 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2020
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