India Palmer is a novelist. She’s not been a very successful novelist, with most of her books getting some critical acclaim but slow sales. It’s who she is. She’s married to a sculptor, Theodor, and so they very much live the life of the “struggling artists.” Sometimes things are good, and sometimes not so much so. Her Manhattan friends are much wealthier, which puts her in a dilemma of trying to keep up with the Joneses.
When she meets Win, a successful mortgage trader, at best friends’ Emma and Will’s beach house, he tells her he can make her a trader if she wants to be his protege. Win is compelling — not good-looking but with the charisma that comes from power and confidence (and money).
What’s more, just as India’s most recent novel is released to dubious fanfare, financier Will tells her that he’s quit his lucrative job to follow his dream of writing a novel.
I had thought Dear Money would be a sort of cross between chick lit and social commentary, but I’ve marked it as literary fiction for the way that narrator India Palmer’s mind worked, and the way her thoughts were expressed on the page by author Martha McPhee.
The book held my interest, but it’s the kind of book that I had to concentrate to read. I couldn’t read it when I was tired or distracted. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s definitely not chick lit. If you want to read an interesting modern take on Pygmalian, ponder the relationships between adult couple friends, the disparity of the haves and have-nots, and the many phases of a woman’s life, which often includes reinvention, then I think you’ll enjoy Dear Money.
Jennifer Donovan holds money dear, but not too dear. She blogs at Snapshot which yields her no money at all.