Chicklit Club
 

NEW RELEASE

 
 

Break in Case of Emergency - Jessica Winter (2016)

 

Jen is an out-of-work artist who lives in New York with husband Jim. She is hired as a communications manager at the Leora Infinitas Foundation, or LIFt, an organisation that focuses on empowering women all over the world. Surrounded by colleagues whose job seems to be to agree to everything her boss says, Jen tries to survive her professional life while at home she and Jim are working on the Project, aka getting pregnant. Jen feels inferior to her more successful friends, she has a strange relationship with her passive-aggressive mother, and, after months of working at the foundation, she still hasn't personally met her boss who has a love of acronyms and imaginary programs. This is a funny but also moving novel, a brilliant and original read. (NP)

Rating 8/10
 
 

Break in Case of Emergency, the debut novel by Jessica Winter, is a satire centred around a toxic workplace. The summary says: "Jen has reached her early thirties and has all but abandoned a once-promising painting career when, spurred by the 2008 economic crisis, she takes a poorly defined job at a feminist nonprofit. The foundation's ostensible aim is to empower women, but staffers spend all their time devising acronyms for imaginary programs, ruthlessly undermining one another, and stroking the ego of their boss, the larger-than-life celebrity philanthropist Leora Infinitas.
Jen's complicity in this passive-aggressive hellscape only intensifies her feelings of inferiority compared to her two best friends - one a wealthy attorney with a picture-perfect family, the other a passionately committed artist - as does Jen's apparent inability to have a baby, a source of existential panic that begins to affect her marriage and her already precarious status at the office.
As Break in Case of Emergency unfolds, a fateful art exhibition, a surreal boondoggle adventure in Belize, and a devastating personal loss conspire to force Jen to reckon with some hard truths about herself and the people she loves most." Break in Case of Emergency is out in July 2016.

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