Ambitious Heroines
Happy New Year!
In two days, I’ll be co-leading Creative Intentions in Focus: a New Year’s Goal-Setting Workshop, to help YOU become the ambitious hero or heroine of your wildest 2024 dreams. RSVP here to reserve a spot.
Onto your regularly scheduled newsletter! It’s a new year, so let’s start on a high note with some HIGHLY ambitious heroines. We’ve got a diverse spread of ambitions, from stock trading to board game empires to reality TV dancers, so take your pick and enjoy!
Magnate by Joanna Shupe. Emmett Cavanaugh was born in the NYC slums and now, thanks to his steel empire, sleeps in a massive mansion. Despite his dramatic rise in society, though, he still doesn’t feel like one of them (because they don’t want him to, not really), and definitely isn’t interested in any of the flighty women he now finds buzzing about him and his new money lifestyle.
That is, until Elizabeth Sloane marches into his office with a proposition- women aren’t allowed on the Stock Exchange floor, but she’s a whiz, and needs a man to partner with to make her trades on her behalf. She’s got a lot to prove, a lot to lose, and no one who’s willing to bet on her. Emmett is kind of her last shot, and thankfully, after some wheedling, he agrees.
Of course, that’s just the beginning. Elizabeth Sloane is the energy I need at the start of 2024, even if I still don’t really understand how stocks work.
Rating: 4/5
How hot? 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Devil in Spring by Lisa Kleypas. Gabriel, Lord St. Vincent, is no stranger to women attempting to trap him into marriage. He’s the son of a duke, after all, and a notorious one at that (if you wait three weeks, you’ll be meeting his dad in this very newsletter!). So how is it that Gabriel ends up in a compromising position with the one woman who has no interest in marrying him?
Lady Pandora Ravenel is a known eccentric and has far higher aspirations for herself than marriage (her twin sister, Cassandra, is the romantic of the two. You may remember her from my curvy heroines roundup a few months back). Pandora has invented a board game that she’s working on mass-producing; her brother-in-law owns the most fashionable store in London (this newsletter hasn’t met him yet, but SOON, probably, you will) and has already agreed to sell the game if she can get her manufacturing in order. So this whole accidentally-ruined-despite-there-being-a-totally-innocent-explanation-into-marriage business is a real drag.
Pandora has next to no interest in the rakish Lord St. Vincent, but, well, he is handsome. And his family, who she meets while deciding if she’ll accept the scandal of staying unattached or agree to marry him, is very nice. And, well, he didn’t run off screaming when she confided her board game business dreams to him. So… alright. Marriage it is!
The fun doesn’t end once they marry, of course, because it turns out that in Pandora’s poking around for business partners, she’s accidentally (so many accidents!) embroiled into a vast and dangerous conspiracy. Our definitely-not-in-love-but-certainly-fond-of-one-another husband and wife duo will need to learn to trust each other and themselves in order to make it out alive.
Rating: 4.5/5
How hot? 🔥🔥🔥🔥
Take The Lead by Alexis Daria. Quick aside- this book was re-released mid 2023 (after being originally published in 2017) with some light rewrites of the story as a whole but, most importantly, a major epilogue re-do. When I originally read this book in 2022, it was a 4. With the rewrite and especially with the new epilogue, it graduated half a point! No spoilers but the original epilogue had the MMC modeling full time?? So bizarre and out of character. The new one suits him MUCH better.
Backing up. This book is a great one if you’re looking for reality show romance, because it’s got TWO reality show stars teaming up. Our ambitious heroine is Gina Morales, a dancer on one of those audience-vote dance competitions who wants to make it big and by all rights should ALREADY have done so- she’s a triple threat! Unfortunately, her position on her current show is tenuous because she’s never made it to the finals before, and her producers are constantly pressuring her to let them cast her for a “showmance.” As in, someone with a more than platonic connection to the celebrity they pair her with. Gina is resistant to the point of hostile, fairly wanting to be judged for her talent and not written off as someone who has to sleep around to remain relevant and valuable. Especially given the awful double standards for women in the industry, not to mention women of color.
So it’s complicated when she’s paired this new season with quite possibly the hottest (and also most resistant to learning dance) celebrity they could find her: Stone Nielson, who stars alongside his family in a survivalist reality show based in Alaska. Both Gina and Stone have complicated feelings about their realities, as well as the fact that neither really imagined themselves in reality shows long-term, and this forges an early bond that quickly brings the attempted showmance angle the producers are pushing into WAY TOO REAL territory.
I loved the deft way celebrity, double/triple standards, and unrealized ambition were balanced in this book which wasn’t quite an indictment of the entertainment industry but also wasn’t a glowing endorsement either.
Rating: 4.5/5
How hot? 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Next week, I’ll be recommending books about elite female athletes!
What should I be reading next? Let me know in the comments!