A solid, suspenseful Wall Street tale.
Debut novelist Hemphill successfully portrays life working at a big bank.
It’s October 2007, months before the subprime lending crisis, and Sophie Landgraf is a fresh-out-of-college Wall Street analyst working on her first big deal. Overtired, overcaffeinated and overworked, Sophie is still adjusting to the dog-eat-dog world of banking. Vainly, and in typical The Devil Wears Prada mode, she attempts to balance work and home life, especially her relationship with Will, the shaggy-haired college boyfriend, who helped her grieve when her mother died in an auto accident. Growing up poor and lacking financial support are Sophie’s motivations for working in the financial sector. But she’s also smart, good with numbers and actually likes her job; it’s with mixed feelings that readers will watch her strive toward success. The other people on Sophie’s account are Vasu, the vice president who never sees his wife and child; Ethan, the sharklike head of their group; and Jake Hutchinson, a mostly wholesome CEO client. None are particularly nuanced, but all are more sympathetic than one might expect, and by telling parts of the story from each of their points of view, Hemphill goes deep into the murky moral waters in which they all swim. Other bleak themes, precisely brought to life, are the excessive dedication that banking expects of its employees, institutional sexism and the impossibility of friendship in business. The deal itself is arguably the real protagonist and the reason readers will eagerly turn pages. Hemphill pulls off the neat trick of making the complex financial transaction clear to lay readers without dumbing down her characters.
A solid, suspenseful Wall Street tale.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-5441-1457-9
Page Count: 309
Publisher: Amazon/New Harvest
Review Posted Online: Nov. 3, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
A presold prefab blockbuster, what with King's Carrie hitting the moviehouses, Salem's Lot being lensed, The Shining itself sold to Warner Bros. and tapped as a Literary Guild full selection, NAL paperback, etc. (enough activity to demand an afterlife to consummate it all).
The setting is The Overlook, a palatial resort on a Colorado mountain top, snowbound and closed down for the long, long winter. Jack Torrance, a booze-fighting English teacher with a history of violence, is hired as caretaker and, hoping to finish a five-act tragedy he's writing, brings his wife Wendy and small son Danny to the howling loneliness of the half-alive and mad palazzo. The Overlook has a gruesome past, scenes from which start popping into the present in various suites and the ballroom. At first only Danny, gifted with second sight (he's a "shiner"), can see them; then the whole family is being zapped by satanic forces. The reader needs no supersight to glimpse where the story's going as King's formula builds to a hotel reeling with horrors during Poesque New Year's Eve revelry and confetti outta nowhere....
Back-prickling indeed despite the reader's unwillingness at being mercilessly manipulated.
Pub Date: Jan. 28, 1976
ISBN: 0385121679
Page Count: 453
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1976
PERSPECTIVES
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.
Another surprise from an author who never writes the same novel twice.
Though Whitehead has earned considerable critical acclaim for his earlier work—in particular his debut (The Intuitionist, 1999) and its successor (John Henry Days, 2001)—he’ll likely reach a wider readership with his warmest novel to date. Funniest as well, though there have been flashes of humor throughout his writing. The author blurs the line between fiction and memoir as he recounts the coming-of-age summer of 15-year-old Benji Cooper in the family’s summer retreat of New York’s Sag Harbor. “According to the world, we were the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses,” writes Whitehead. Caucasians are only an occasional curiosity within this idyll, and parents are mostly absent as well. Each chapter is pretty much a self-contained entity, corresponding to a rite of passage: getting the first job, negotiating the mysteries of the opposite sex. There’s an accident with a BB gun and plenty of episodes of convincing someone older to buy beer, but not much really happens during this particular summer. Yet by the end of it, Benji is well on his way to becoming Ben, and he realizes that he is a different person than when the summer started. He also realizes that this time in his life will eventually live only in memory. There might be some distinctions between Benji and Whitehead, though the novelist also spent his youthful summers in Sag Harbor and was the same age as Benji in 1985, when the novel is set. Yet the first-person narrator has the novelist’s eye for detail, craft of character development and analytical instincts for sharp social commentary.
Not as thematically ambitious as Whitehead’s earlier work, but a whole lot of fun to read.Pub Date: April 28, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-385-52765-1
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2009
BOOK TO SCREEN
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