Opening Belle: A Novel
Written by Maureen Sherry
Narrated by Julia Whelan
4/5
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About this audiobook
It’s 2008 and Isabelle, a thirty-something Wall Street executive, appears to have it all: the sprawling Upper West Side apartment; three healthy children; a handsome husband; and a job as managing director at a large investment bank. But her reality is something else. Her work environment resembles a frat party, her husband feels employment is beneath him, and the bulk of childcare logistics still fall in Belle’s already crowded lap.
Enter Henry, the former college fiancé she never quite got over; now a hedge fund mogul. He becomes her largest client, and Belle gets to see the life she might have had with him. While Henry campaigns to win Belle back, the sexually harassed women in her office take action to improve their working conditions, and recruit a wary Belle into a secret “glass ceiling club” whose goal is to mellow the cowboy banking culture and get equal pay for their work. All along, Belle can sense the financial markets heading toward their soon-to-be historic crash and that something has to give—and when it does, everything is going to change: her marriage, her career, her bank statement, and her colleagues’ frat boy behavior.
Optioned by Reese Witherspoon who called it “smart, biting, and honest,” Opening Belle is “funny, relevant, and often shocking….Even if your own life is far from a fairy tale, it will allow you to laugh, learn, and maybe even lean in—to hug your own family a little closer.” (The Washington Post).
Maureen Sherry
After twelve years on Wall Street, Maureen Sherry—formerly, the youngest Managing Director at Bear Stearns—switched gears to earn her Masters of Fine Arts at Columbia University, to write, and to tutor at inner city schools. Walls Within Walls—her first book, a mystery for middle school audiences—has been awarded curriculum prizes by the states of Texas and Connecticut, and she was named one of the Best New Voices by the American Library Association. Maureen is also an active board member of numerous charities. She lives in New York City with her husband and four children.
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Reviews for Opening Belle
89 ratings2 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Now here is a book from a former Managing Director at a Wall St investment bank - where few women ever rise to that level, and where the few that do have to put up with incredible harassment and abuse from their male co-workers, and where it's mostly "every bitch for herself". SO I BELIEVE EVERY WORD. I LOVED this book! Isabelle, mother of three, with a slacker discontented husband "babysitting" at home, devotes all the time required by her company to succeed at work and to pull down seven figure bonuses - but she knows it isn't working. When a group of female co-workers decide to try and do something to change the poisonous culture, Isabelle's not quite on board - she doesn't want to be seen as a whiner and she needs that $$$ to keep rolling in. Plus she's just a bit sanctimonious about doing better than they are. Well, hang on, girl, because EVERYTHING'S about to change, and 2008 is coming up soon.This is a very well written domestic and financial thriller. Don't miss it!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/53.5 stars.
More meat here than in your average Sophie Kinsella novel, and mostly it kept me excited to keep reading. But it got a little soapbox-y at times, and I'm not sure it did a great job explaining the roles of traders and bankers in the subprime mortgage crisis, at least in a way that the lay reader would understand. I also wasn't always clear whether Belle was meant to be telling her story as she lived it, or whether she was recounting it some years down the road. Some textual clues pointed one way, some the other. One of those clues involved a big jump in time near the end that felt a little like the author wasn't sure how to write a particular climactic event, so she decided to skip it and show the aftermath instead.
I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.