Available:*
Library | Call Number | Status |
|---|---|---|
Searching... Dallas Public Library | FICTION - BAKER | Searching... Unknown |
Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Baker, A. 2017 | Searching... Unknown |
Bound With These Titles
On Order
Summary
Summary
A captivating debut about wealth, envy, and secrets: the story of five women whose lives are dramatically changed by the downfall of a financial titan
On September 15, 2008, the world of Greenwich, Connecticut, is shaken. When the investment bank Weiss & Partners is shuttered, CEO Bob D'Amico must fend off allegations of malfeasance, as well as the judgment and resentment of his community. As panic builds, five women in his life must scramble to negotiate power on their own terms and ask themselves what --if anything--is worth saving.
In the aftermath of this collapse, Bob D'Amico's teenage daughter Madison begins to probe her father's heretofore secret world for information. Four other women in Madison's life --her mother Isabel, her best friend Amanda, her nanny Lily, and family friend Mina --begin to question their own shifting roles in their insular, moneyed world.
For the adults, this means learning how to protect their own in a community that has turned against them. For the younger generation, it means heightened rebellion and heartache during the already volatile teenage years. And for Lily, it means deciding where her loyalties lie when it comes to the family in which she is both an essential member and, ultimately, an outsider. All these women have witnessed more than they've disclosed, all harbor secret insecurities and fears, and all must ask themselves--where is the line between willful ignorance and unspoken complicity?
With astonishing precision, insight, and grace, Angelica Baker weaves a timeless social novel about the rituals of intimacy and community; of privilege and information; of family and risk; of etiquette and taboo.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Baker's ambitious debut focuses on 15-year-old Madison D'Amico and her family during the "shell-shocked" year her father's investment bank plummets from financial giant to bankruptcy amid rumors of criminal wrongdoing. When his business starts to implode, Brooklyn-born CEO Bob "Silverback" D'Amico relocates to his luxury Manhattan apartment, while back in Greenwich, Conn., his wife, Isabel-previously envied for her elegant taste and old money-tries to remain aloof from a rising tide of gossip and hostility. Isabel's friend Mina offers comfort with Xanax, and then finds herself among the gossips. Meanwhile, at Greenwich Prep, Bob and Isabel's daughter, Madison, chooses the company of boyfriend Chip and trouble-seeking Zoe over former BFF Amanda, whose father persists in writing newspaper columns excoriating Madison's. Alert and sympathetic to Madison's precarious situation, the D'Amicos' nanny, Lily, tries to help her charge, but discovers loyalty has its challenges as well as limits. Baker switches perspective among five women (Isabel, Lily, Mina, Madison, Amanda) to create a collage of Greenwich parents, children, and the people paid to manage the parents' houses and care for their kids. For the Greenwich contingent, there are outsiders and insiders, official and unofficial stories, all teeming with betrayals large and small, accidental and intentional. Baker examines different facets of these betrayals from multiple points of view. As the teenager puzzles out her father's actions and her mother's silences, a personal, thought-provoking portrait emerges of the American Dream, complete with a web of visible and invisible cracks in the foundation. (June) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
The failure of an investment bank is bad news for the family of the CEO.Madison D'Amico, the teenage protagonist of Baker's debut, has been rigorously trained by her mother, Isabel, in the hyperawareness and discipline required of the rich and beautiful: eat grapefruit, say little, trust no one. This conditioning will shape the way she deals with the crisis that jolts her well-cushioned adolescence when her father's investment bank is shut down, with him to blame, and to be charged, for its failure. Over many lugubrious chapters, she and her ice-queen mother will suffer the bottomless, nervy schadenfreude of their Greenwich, Connecticut, community. Also miserable will be the family's nanny, Lily; Isabel's one female friend, Mina Dawes; and Madison's one female friend, Amanda, whose father is the journalist leading the charge against the CEO. After a couple weeks in hiding, D'Amico comes home to hole up in his study and, in a series of late-night conversations, confides the inside story nobody knows to his teenage daughter. Based on a series of epigraphs quoting Richard Fuld of Lehman BrothersFuld was called the Gorilla, D'Amico is called the Silverback, etc.the story mirrors real events. Yet the lifestyles and financial maneuverings depicted all feel generic; if this is an insider's story, it doesn't read like one. There is a bewildering amount of interior monologue from the five main female characters; the most banal conversation is plotted, managed, and second-guessed to a deadening degree, creating endless low-level tension that goes nowhere. On the other hand, potentially interesting plotlines, like the one about the nanny's boyfriend's connection to a wannabe investigative blogger who is stalking Madison, are underdeveloped, then tied hastily in a bow in the final pages. A book that shows just how boring the rich truly are. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Five very different women orbit Bob D'Amico, the CEO of a high-profile investment bank: his wife, Isabel; his wife's friend Mina; his daughter, Madison; her best friend, Amanda; and the nanny, Lily. While Bob is off in Manhattan attempting to steer Weiss & Partners out of a complete financial meltdown, the women all respond to the fallout in their own ways. They all live in Greenwich, Connecticut, the epicenter of country clubs, charity auctions, and gossip that could break the sound barrier. As the financial sector continues to collapse, Bob and the women start keeping a variety of secrets from one another, so nobody truly knows what's happening at any given time. Blending high-stakes economic intrigue with high-class family drama, Our Little Racket is a sweeping and immersive novel. Baker fully inhabits each of her characters, voicing each with depth and breadth. Though Bob is nominally the center of the story, teenage and tenacious Madison has the most satisfying story arc. Fans of Cristina Alger's The Darlings (2012) and Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's The Nest (2016) will enjoy this engrossing and illuminating glimpse into Greenwich's upper crust.--Turza, Stephanie Copyright 2017 Booklist
Library Journal Review
[DEBUT] This ambitious debut novel about the emotional fallout in 2008 for the family of Bob D'Amico, a high-flying investment banker under criminal investigation, tries to go deep into the character of the women in his household-ice-queen wife Isabel and her teenage daughter Madison and loyal college-grad nanny Lily-but succeeds more in giving readers a snarky peek past the security gates and up the long driveways of the Greenwich, CT, homes of the well-off and the unbelievably well-off Wall Street moguls. The book is getting a lot of buzz and should appeal to readers of Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney's The Nest, Randy Susan Meyers's The Widow of Wall Street, and Holly Peterson's It Happened in the Hamptons. Verdict Put this one in your beach bag for its dissection of the reshuffling of the social order when public scrutiny falls on a family in the small circle of the fabulously wealthy. [See Prepub Alert, 1/8/17.]-Laurie Cavanaugh, Thayer P.L., Braintree, MA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.