Cecilia Rabess

I had a very close friend, the kind I would get out of bed at 4 a.m. to bail out of jail (not that this ever came up.) We were even very happy business partners for a time. I know her to be a truly good and loving person who donates nearly every non-work hour of her life to kids with cancer, both fundraising and working with families and even just sitting with children whose parents cannot afford not to work and who have to leave their children in Atlanta during the week while they drive home to Alabama or South Carolina or elsewhere to work. I knew when I met her in 2006 that we were opposed to one another politically and that she and her family were (are) megachurch-going, second-amendment absolutist, conservative Republicans. And we loved and respected each other and we tried to never talk politics. Then 2016 happened. I have not spoken to this friend in 7 years. I would still bail her out if she needed me to do so. I would still do almost anything for her. But I cannot be around her anymore. I thought about her and this post-2016 version of America a lot while reading this, and I think Rabess did a great job of focusing on a number of core considerations that are hard to distill. It was also a fun if gut-clenching book to read.

A lot of the GR reviews of this are insane. They indicate that this is a romance where the hurdle to HEA is that one partner is a racist. This could not be further from the truth. First, though there is a romantic relationship at the center of the story this is not in any way a romance. Second, Josh is not a racist in the sense that he harbors ill-will toward people of color, or that he does not do little things to help them advance. He is a racist in the sense that he is a brilliant hedge-fund millionaire still in his 20s, and he works to lock into place barriers to success for all but the richest Americans, almost all of whom are White and male. But Jess is doing the same thing. Less successfully (in large part because it is nearly impossible for a Black woman to thrive in that world) but she hustles to make the rich richer at Goldman and at a hedge fund run by essentially a Jewish Gordon Gekko, where she is at the top of the leaderboard for trades. Josh is a great boyfriend who just has a cracked lens when he looks at the world. Jess is a woman coming into her own and understanding what it is to be a Black woman in this America after a childhood in Nebraska and college years at an Ivy, and no Black friends or family to guide her (until later.) She needs to try to reconcile what she knows about justice and oppression with the fact that she is living off her BFs hedge fund earnings, living in his $4 million loft and drinking $12 coffees. Many things go on, the romance in the middle in essential, it helps to see the complexity of our relationships with people with different lenses. GR is filled with 20-somethings who know nothing of the world and want everything to be black-and-white and fair. This book rolls around in the gray and recognizes nothing is fair. Lots of people can't handle the truth.

There are moments this loses its flow, many threads are introduced anfdabandoned, some things go on too long, and there are editing failures (for instance there is a reference to George Floyd in a scene happening years before Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd.) This is not perfect, but it is very very good and the last sentence is fantastic. I am here for Cecilia Rabess' next book and glad I took direction from my GR friend Anita and read this.… (meer)