Truthfully, this book has been on my radar for quite some time. What can I say, Reese’s Book Club has good taste! Most of the time when I think to go check out Whisper Network, someone’s already gotten to it, but my luck turned around during my last trip to the library. This book by Chandler Baker was not totally what I was expecting, but the end result was definitely satisfying enough.
Sloane, Ardie, and Gracie have all been working as lawyers at an athletic-wear company, Truviv, for almost the last decade of their lives, but everything comes tumbling down when future CFO Ames Garrett falls to his death off the company’s 18th story building. That’s the setup, but the book itself had an interesting cadence. Interspersed throughout the novel are depositions and interviews with the three women and some other employees, but some chapters also started out with a very general message meant to be addressed to the masses before digging down into any one of the three women’s stories. I wasn’t crazy about the “we” parts, but in the end they really got big points across related to the #MeToo movement. Women have been and continue to be treated differently and poorly in the corporate world, and Baker is just trying to shed a truthful light on it in between her fiction (still based in truth).
Sloane is brash but a very hard worker who’s had a sordid past with Ames. She also happens to add his name to a “Bad Man” list going around Dallas. Ames definitely belongs on it though. Sloane’s best friend Ardie is just trying to succeed at being a single mother and steer clear of Ames, who she detests. The feeling is mutual. Then there is Grace, who is seemingly perfect, but might also be falling apart in her personal life. Especially so soon after having a baby. The three women all tentatively befriend a new hire named Katherine, who seems to be caught in the crosshairs of Ames’ attention. They try to warn her and mentor her, but when the times comes to band together, Katherine is only looking out for herself.
Without giving too much else away, that’s where I’ll stop. I enjoyed the talk of sexual harassment in a corporate setting more than I thought I would, and I came to appreciate the generalizations that Baker made, too. Mainly because what she said was 100% true. If she’d just left it like that, the book would have fallen flat for me then, but she managed to make it a tantalizing thriller, too, which I always enjoy. Most of what happened in this book could almost certainly happen in real life, which is probably what made it all the more unsettling. I don’t know that this book was enough to get me to check out some of her other works, but that remains to be seen. In the meantime, if you want an entertaining and educational read, then give this a go!