A leisurely paced but ultimately absorbing story of an aspiring Wall Street trader.
This debut novel follows a young man who, hoping to achieve financial independence, finds himself drawn to the stock market.
By the early 1970s, Rogers Stout is only 16 years old, but his father, Dr. Charles Stout, wants his son to live up to his potential. The Ohio teen is bright but putting minimal effort into high school studies. This changes the summer before his senior year with an internship at Prescott & Prescott, a stock brokerage and investment banking firm. Rogers becomes fascinated by the stock market and sets his sights on a finance major at Penn-Wharton in Philadelphia. He closely follows the market all through college, gradually developing abilities, such as how to “deconstruct a company’s financials” and “analyze its prospects.” As an exceptional poker player, courtesy of regular sessions with his dad, Rogers equates his investment philosophy with the card game. He plays while winning and stops to reassess his strategy after he’s lost. Rogers’ hard work pays off, as he lands a gig at a research and money management firm in New York. But his subsequent plan to invest in a small company is an unquestionable risk, and life, like the financial markets, can change instantly and unexpectedly. Despite the desperation implied by the title, the levelheaded protagonist is rarely distraught. (The title is derived from a line that a losing poker player—not Rogers—utters.) Still, Fine’s coming-of-age tale is engrossing. The historical backdrop, for one, is an enhancement: Rogers witnesses the 1973-74 stock market crash and worries about his girlfriend, Charlotte Marks, who, in 1977, is in a war zone in Cambodia for Doctors Without Borders. There’s also turmoil in the protagonist’s personal life, as banker Elsbeth Aylesworth fills the void created by his geographical separation from Charlotte. Prose is detail-laden, including poker and baseball games as well as investments, while financial terminology is adequately explained. But there’s still room for humor: Rogers’ description of his job is “to read and think and then occasionally make a bold decision.”
A leisurely paced but ultimately absorbing story of an aspiring Wall Street trader.Pub Date: Aug. 14, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-948122-05-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2018
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.
When tragedy strikes, a mother and daughter forge a new life.
Morgan felt obligated to marry her high school sweetheart, Chris, when she got pregnant with their daughter, Clara. But she secretly got along much better with Chris’ thoughtful best friend, Jonah, who was dating her sister, Jenny. Now her life as a stay-at-home parent has left her feeling empty but not ungrateful for what she has. Jonah and Jenny eventually broke up, but years later they had a one-night stand and Jenny got pregnant with their son, Elijah. Now Jonah is back in town, engaged to Jenny, and working at the local high school as Clara’s teacher. Clara dreams of being an actress and has a crush on Miller, who plans to go to film school, but her father doesn't approve. It doesn’t help that Miller already has a jealous girlfriend who stalks him via text from college. But Clara and Morgan’s home life changes radically when Chris and Jenny are killed in an accident, revealing long-buried secrets and forcing Morgan to reevaluate the life she chose when early motherhood forced her hand. Feeling betrayed by the adults in her life, Clara marches forward, acting both responsible and rebellious as she navigates her teenage years without her father and her aunt, while Jonah and Morgan's relationship evolves in the wake of the accident. Front-loaded with drama, the story leaves plenty of room for the mother and daughter to unpack their feelings and decide what’s next.
The emotions run high, the conversations run deep, and the relationships ebb and flow with grace.Pub Date: Dec. 10, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5420-1642-1
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Montlake Romance
Review Posted Online: Oct. 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2019
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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