Opening Belle
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In 2008 Isabelle, a 30-something Wall Street executive, appears to have it all: the sprawling Upper West Side apartment, three children, a handsome husband, and a job as managing director of a large investment bank. But her reality is something else. Belle is losing respect for her stay-at-home, spendthrift husband, the markets are threatening to annihilate world financial order, and her ex-fiance, the guy she never quite got over, comes back into her life as her largest client, offering her a tempting glimpse of how their life together could have been. Written by Wall Street insider Maureen Sherry who saw plenty of bad behaviour up close, Opening Belle is an unconventional love story and a revelatory, perceptive and funny account of what life is really like for women working in the hardball, high-stakes world of high finance.
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A look at the high-risk high-reward world of investment banking, where clients are taken to strip clubs, and female coworkers are harassed, belittled and rarely promoted. And while the women take home millions, they take home fewer millions than their male counterparts. Time to start a club - the GCC - glass ceiling club. The rebels are clearly those in the lower ranks, while those women who managed to rise to the top, learned to avert her eyes and shut her mouth.
I could have done without the romance subplot, but at least appreciated that it chose a new path.
Could the financial crisis of 2008 be avoided by including more women into the (mortgage) risk-assessment teams?
I quite liked this, but it also leaves a slight sour feeling because you're supposed to root for this woman who takes home a year end bonuses of 3 million dollars and still stresses about how she can sustain the lifestyle she chose for her family.
