BOND GIRL: A REVIEW AND GIVEAWAY

 GIVEAWAY ENDED
BOND GIRL

BY ERIN DUFFY

ABOUT THE BOOK:

When other little girls were dreaming about becoming doctors or lawyers, Alex Garrett set her sights on conquering the high-powered world of Wall Street. And while she's prepared to fight her way into an elitist boys' club, or duck the occasional errant football, she quickly realizes she's in over her head when she is relegated to a kiddie-sized folding chair with her new moniker --- Girlie --- inscribed in whiteout across the back.

No matter. She’s determined she's got the stamina to make it in bond sales at Cromwell Pierce, one of The Street’s most esteemed brokerage firms. Keeping her eyes on the prize, she’ll endure whatever menial, degrading tasks come her way --- trekking to the Bronx for $1,000 wheels of Parmesan cheese, discovering a secretary’s secret Friday night dance party in the conference room; fielding a constant barrage of "friendly" practical jokes, learning to ropes from her unpredictable, slightly scary, loyalty demanding boss; even babysitting a colleague while he consumes the entire contents of a vending machine on a $28,000 bet.

Ignoring her friends’ pleas to quit, Alex excels (while learning how to roll with the punches and laugh at herself) and soon advances from lowly analyst to slightly-less-lowly associate. Suddenly, she’s addressed by her real name and the impenetrable boys’ club has transformed into 38 older brothers and one possible boyfriend. Then The Apocalypse hits. As her life on The Street falls into the depths of intolerable cruelty --- both personally and professionally --- Alex is forced to choose between sticking with Cromwell Pierce as it teeters on the brink of disaster and kicking off her Jimmy Choos to run for higher ground.

Fast-paced, funny and thoroughly addictive, BOND GIRL will leave you cheering for Alex: a feisty, ambitious woman with the spirit to stand up to the best (and worst) of the boys on the Street --- and ultimately rise above them all.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Erin Duffy graduated from Georgetown University in 2000 with a B.A. in English and has spent 10-plus years in fixed income sales on Wall Street. BOND GIRL is her first novel.

Visit Erin on Facebook.

AN EXCERPT FROM BOND GIRL:
I am too old for this.

Click.

At 6:00 a.m., my clock radio turns on, and music blares from the speakers, shattering the blissful morning quiet, the latest Beyoncé song reminding me that the weekend is over. Waking up on Mondays is bad enough, but waking up on Monday when you have a really bad hangover, the kind of hangover that makes your toenails hurt, is damn near impossible. Half in a coma, I dig around under the mass of pillows crammed against the dark green wood of my headboard, searching for the radio’s remote control to snooze for another blessed ten (maybe twenty) minutes. Mercifully, my hand makes contact with the remote somewhere in the upper right-hand corner of my bed, and I wave it in the direction of the nightstand, silently begging for the room to fall silent. That is to say, as silent as a third-floor apartment in Manhattan can ever really be.

A lot of people dream about waking up in New York City. Hell, Sinatra wrote an entire song about it. Unless of course you are trying to sleep, in which case New York is where very tired, cranky, hungover people go to die.  

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MY THOUGHTS/REVIEW:
In Erin Duffy’s debut novel, BOND GIRL, I found a riotous narrative about what it means to a woman working in a predominately male world, on the street of dreams, and I don’t mean Hollywood! Wall Street! Where the bulls and the bears will run you over if you aren’t strong enough and sharp enough to defeat them, or get out of their way.

In BOND GIRL, Duffy gives readers Alex Garrett, the main character and a very congenial female protagonist who is pinning her lifelong dreams on the market, the stock market! When Alex is hired to work the sales floor in a prestigious firm, she believes she has reached her goal. Little does Alex know that her work has barely begun. As the female in this male dominated world, where harassment is not a word in their vernacular, the male workers put Alex through all one can imagine. From menial tasks to embarrassing practical jokes, Alex wonders if anyone takes their work seriously.  She needs to remind herself that this company is held in the highest esteem among its competitors.

With gumption and tenaciousness, Alex not only makes a name for herself and does well, but begins to secretly date one of her fellow associates. It was easy to see where this was going because when the crash came, it took Alex’s life along with it. How she gets out of this and where life takes her next is where Duffy does her best work. The more serious part of the novel is filled by getting to know what Alex is really made of. I found Erin Duffy’s BOND GIRL to be entertaining, insightful, and a relaxing way to spend an evening. 

 GIVEAWAY
THANKS TO THE WILLIAM MORROW TEAM
AND HARPER COLLINS, I HAVE ONE COPY OF
THIS DEBUT BOOK, BOND GIRL, TO GIVE AWAY
 

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GIVEAWAY ENDS AT
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GOOD LUCK!