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
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.
An Irishman uncovers abuse at a Magdalen laundry in this compact and gripping novel.
As Christmas approaches in the winter of 1985, Bill Furlong finds himself increasingly troubled by a sense of dissatisfaction. A coal and timber merchant living in New Ross, Ireland, he should be happy with his life: He is happily married and the father of five bright daughters, and he runs a successful business. But the scars of his childhood linger: His mother gave birth to him while still a teenager, and he never knew his father. Now, as he approaches middle age, Furlong wonders, “What was it all for?…Might things never change or develop into something else, or new?” But a series of troubling encounters at the local convent, which also functions as a “training school for girls” and laundry business, disrupts Furlong’s sedate life. Readers familiar with the history of Ireland’s Magdalen laundries, institutions in which women were incarcerated and often died, will immediately recognize the circumstances of the desperate women trapped in New Ross’ convent, but Furlong does not immediately understand what he has witnessed. Keegan, a prizewinning Irish short story writer, says a great deal in very few words to extraordinary effect in this short novel. Despite the brevity of the text, Furlong’s emotional state is fully rendered and deeply affecting. Keegan also carefully crafts a web of complicity around the convent’s activities that is believably mundane and all the more chilling for it. The Magdalen laundries, this novel implicitly argues, survived not only due to the cruelty of the people who ran them, but also because of the fear and selfishness of those who were willing to look aside because complicity was easier than resistance.
A stunning feat of storytelling and moral clarity.Pub Date: Nov. 30, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-8021-5874-1
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Aug. 31, 2021
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2021
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.
As Ireland devolves into a brutal police state, one woman tries to preserve her family in this stark fable.
For Eilish Stack, a molecular biologist living with her husband and four children in Dublin, life changes all at once and then slowly worsens beyond imagining. Two men appear at her door one night, agents of the new secret police, seeking her husband, Larry, a union official. Soon he is detained under the Emergency Powers Act recently pushed through by the new ruling party, and she cannot contact him. Eilish sees things shifting at work to those backing the ruling party. The state takes control of the press, the judiciary. Her oldest son receives a summons to military duty for the regime, and she tries to send him to Northern Ireland. He elects to join the rebel forces and soon she cannot contact him, either. His name and address appear in a newspaper ad listing people dodging military service. Eilish is coping with her father’s growing dementia, her teenage daughter’s depression, the vandalizing of her car and house. Then war comes to Dublin as the rebel forces close in on the city. Offered a chance to flee the country by her sister in Canada, Eilish can’t abandon hope for her husband’s and son’s returns. Lynch makes every step of this near-future nightmare as plausible as it is horrific by tightly focusing on Eilish, a smart, concerned woman facing terrible choices and losses. An exceptionally gifted writer, Lynch brings a compelling lyricism to her fears and despair while he marshals the details marking the collapse of democracy and the norms of daily life. His tonal control, psychological acuity, empathy, and bleakness recall Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006). And Eilish, his strong, resourceful, complete heroine, recalls the title character of Lynch’s excellent Irish-famine novel, Grace (2017).
Captivating, frightening, and a singular achievement.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780802163011
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Atlantic Monthly
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2023
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