A sharp-eyed novel of corporate manners.
Intrigue swirls around HR executive Rosa Guerrero in this engrossing workplace drama by Medoff (I Couldn’t Love You More, 2012, etc.).
Ellery Consumer Research Group is one of “a glut of boutique research firms…fighting for market share” in the wake of the economic meltdown. The HR department has already shrunk from 22 to 16 to 13 as the story begins in November 2009, and the CEO is pressuring Rosa to cut more. She's just had to fire her trusted right-hand man for embezzling, leaving her at age 64 without an obvious choice to groom for succession. Longtime training and recruiting director Rob Hirsch is blatantly burned-out, while hotshot Wharton MBA Kenny Verville is too busy looking for a better job at a bigger company to pay much attention to his current work. Rounding out the cast of principals are Communications/Policy VP Lucy Bender, gunning for a promotion, and Employee Benefits manager Leo Smalls, Rosa’s principal confidant. These two cover for their boss after she has a minor stroke and, once back at work, her memory and behavior continue to deteriorate. Although Medoff frankly chronicles plenty of scheming and self-serving, Rosa’s devotion to her staff is repaid with loyalty and affection that are all the more poignant coming from believably flawed characters. People get second chances here: Kenny buckles down at Ellery after blowing an outside prospect, and Rob finds that getting laid off is the kick in the pants he needs to revitalize himself. At the center stands Rosa, a tough corporate infighter who is also a mother hen; she’s the most vivid figure, but everyone gets nicely textured treatment in an engrossing narrative that manages to encompass Lucy’s therapy issues, Rob’s devotion to his family, Leo’s search for Mr. Right, and Kenny’s troubled marriage while maintaining the main focus on their lives at work. An economical epilogue makes clever use of corporate organization charts to quickly trace the characters’ odysseys after the story’s bittersweet conclusion in August 2010.
A sharp-eyed novel of corporate manners.Pub Date: Jan. 9, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-06-266076-3
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2017
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PROFILES
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it...
Harris, creator of grand, symphonic thrillers from Fatherland (1992) to An Officer and a Spy (2014), scores with a chamber piece of a novel set in the Vatican in the days after a fictional pope dies.
Fictional, yes, but the nameless pontiff has a lot in common with our own Francis: He’s famously humble, shunning the lavish Apostolic Palace for a small apartment, and he is committed to leading a church that engages with the world and its problems. In the aftermath of his sudden death, rumors circulate about the pope’s intention to fire certain cardinals. At the center of the action is Cardinal Lomeli, Dean of the College of Cardinals, whose job it is to manage the conclave that will elect a new pope. He believes it is also his duty to uncover what the pope knew before he died because some of the cardinals in question are in the running to succeed him. “In the running” is an apt phrase because, as described by Harris, the papal conclave is the ultimate political backroom—albeit a room, the Sistine Chapel, covered with Michelangelo frescoes. Vying for the papal crown are an African cardinal whom many want to see as the first black pope, a press-savvy Canadian, an Italian arch-conservative (think Cardinal Scalia), and an Italian liberal who wants to continue the late pope’s campaign to modernize the church. The novel glories in the ancient rituals that constitute the election process while still grounding that process in the real world: the Sistine Chapel is fitted with jamming devices to thwart electronic eavesdropping, and the pressure to act quickly is increased because “rumours that the pope is dead are already trending on social media.”
An illuminating read for anyone interested in the inner workings of the Catholic Church; for prelate-fiction superfans, it is pure temptation.Pub Date: Nov. 22, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-451-49344-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 6, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2016
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BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.
A young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up—sorry, can't tell you how it ends!
Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. It's 2011, after the financial crisis, which hovers around the edges of the book like a ghost. Connell is popular in school, good at soccer, and nice; Marianne is strange and friendless. They're the smartest kids in their class, and they forge an intimacy when Connell picks his mother up from Marianne's house. Soon they're having sex, but Connell doesn't want anyone to know and Marianne doesn't mind; either she really doesn't care, or it's all she thinks she deserves. Or both. Though one time when she's forced into a social situation with some of their classmates, she briefly fantasizes about what would happen if she revealed their connection: "How much terrifying and bewildering status would accrue to her in this one moment, how destabilising it would be, how destructive." When they both move to Dublin for Trinity College, their positions are swapped: Marianne now seems electric and in-demand while Connell feels adrift in this unfamiliar environment. Rooney's genius lies in her ability to track her characters' subtle shifts in power, both within themselves and in relation to each other, and the ways they do and don't know each other; they both feel most like themselves when they're together, but they still have disastrous failures of communication. "Sorry about last night," Marianne says to Connell in February 2012. Then Rooney elaborates: "She tries to pronounce this in a way that communicates several things: apology, painful embarrassment, some additional pained embarrassment that serves to ironise and dilute the painful kind, a sense that she knows she will be forgiven or is already, a desire not to 'make a big deal.' " Then: "Forget about it, he says." Rooney precisely articulates everything that's going on below the surface; there's humor and insight here as well as the pleasure of getting to know two prickly, complicated people as they try to figure out who they are and who they want to become.
Absolutely enthralling. Read it.Pub Date: April 16, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-984-82217-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: Feb. 17, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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