Why a Booktrail?
Destination: New York Departure Time: 2000s
Sex in the city or cheating in the office?
The Assistants
What you need to know before your trail
Tina works for a billionaire CEO in New York and she has to do everything and everything for him as his assistant. Her work is never done and she tirelessly tries to keep up with his quirks and ways of doing things. She barely get a minute to sit down and he doesn’t even seem to notice her.
Tina lives in a tiny, minuscule apartment in the city and so when one day she notices that she has mistakenly been reimbursed for just over $19K, she does wonder for a moment whether she should keep the money or not. It is tempting and well, who would know – it’s not stealing it’s an admin error surely?
When some from the accounting department finds out about it, to Tina’s surprise, she wants a bit of the money to help pay of a debt. Then others find out and they too want a slice of the cake. They claim to be running a website to get young women out of debt, but for how long can they keep up the charade?
Locations
ResetTravel Guide
Office Life in New York City – if you want a picture of what office life in the big city must be like – indeed that of any city in the world, then this is the rather comical and crazy picture painted here
There must be many assistants who resent their invisible positions and their impossible bosses, the young girls who live in the city, independent for the first time and having the time of their lives…if only they had time out of the office to enjoy themselves. This is the revenge story of those who found themselves in lowly positions they didn’t really plan on staying in. Also a guide to living in the city when all you have is buttons in your holey pockets.
There is Tina, who lives in a small apartment and the huge impressive building of Titan Corp – her office is bigger than where she lives.
Like a modern day take on Robin Hood and the davids of this world standing up to the Goliath’s albeit illegally.
Streetview Maps
A) 8th Avenue
C) Tina is from the Bronx. This is the famous zoo
Booktrailer Review
Clare: @thebooktrailer
Aah do you remember the days of Sex and the City and The Devil wears Prada? This novel is a bit of a homage to those and other movies albeit with an undercurrent of dirty dealings, lies and stealing money from your employer as nothing more than an admin error. So, if you hold your sense of disbelief at some of the characters and the choices they make, you’ll not go far wrong.
I did question Tina’s motives in all this though – imagine if we all paid off student loans this way? Where the fun of the novel was for me was the world of the crazy rich and the bosses who don’t know or care if you’re there – unless you forget something and suddenly they are all too aware. Tina starts off by doing wrong and then making a cause from it all – that’s the bit I really warmed to, where she is showing the contrast between the assistants and the bosses, the rich and the downtrodden and the David’s standing up to the Goliaths.
The rise of the assistants is a neat and fun idea. It’s been written by an author who knows office life and politics well so there are plenty of nuances and moments of truth where you shake your head in sympathy.
Set in New York City, you can see the flashing lights of the city down below the Titan Windows, the pearls of wisdom and that grotty flat of Tina’s A city of two worlds but with a lot of spit and sparkle in that office block!
Where Next?
