Bond Girl

Alex Garrett is fresh out of UVA when she takes a job on Wall Street and realizes it's not quite what she'd grown up idolizing. Part bond-market-primer, part Devil Wears Prada, Erin Duffy has drawn extensively from her own decade working in fixed-income sales on Wall Street.

The good: Bond Girl is a quick and entertaining read. It's light - both the fact that it's a slim little novel, not quite reaching 300 pages, and that this is not a book where the reader dwells on, say, how to achieve world peace or the wastefulness of war. The tone (and therefore the narrator, Alex) is witty and, even if Duffy doesn't achieve the hilarity of Twenties Girl, it's quirky-funny.

The bad: Alex manages her personal life so badly that I had a hard time really caring what happened to her to how it all turned out for her. (She was on Wall Street, circa 2008, so I already had some clue what the broad strokes would be, at least.) She's not quite Last Night at Chateau Marmont unlrelateable; I did finish the book and sorta like it.

The thing that really nagged me though were the occasional lapses in Duffy's writing. Alex has dreamed of working on the The Street since she was eight. She dedicated the next 12 years to getting a job on the street. This is in the first chapter. That would make Alex 20, but elsewhere it's written that she's 22 when she begins her job. I've complained about this sort of sloppy work before (see my Last Original Wife rant), but it's the kind of mistake that really shouldn't happen and is incredibly distracting. Similarly, Alex tells us again and again how her desire to work on Wall Street comes from her i-banker dad. Yet, when she visits her boss's home in Connecticut, she's taken aback by the homes, the women in their perfect pearls, and the over-the-top kid's birthday party. By my calculation this is the same neck of the woods where she grew up, since she, too, is from CT, so it's hard to believe any of this is truly shocking, surprising, or intimidating.

Overall, I'd give Bond Girl in the neighborhood of two-and-a-half or three stars. Despite my gripes, it's a fun read, but there are too many truly great books out there to advise moving it to the top of any reading list.