Recommendation from frogbandocto!
Okay so Jessica Joyce definitively dated (or was close friends with someone who dated) a banker at some point during the immediate post-college years, and then she/her friend broke up with them and she’s held onto the memory of what dating a banker is like and used it here, in Romancelandia. It’s surprisingly the first one I’ve ever read with a banker as the unavailable protagonist! Normally they’re lawyers, because that’s an intense job that everyone knows is an intense job! I see me in a novel!!!
BUT
Now I’m going to complain about the timeline for this book, and in doing so do part of my review:
– Eli and Georgia start dating when they are 21
– Eli get an internship from CalPoly at an investment bank that isn’t the bank (in NYC) where he gets his FT offer (…)
– They move to NYC together, and things are difficult because Eli works at lot
– December when they are 23 — aka, Eli is 6 months into his A2 year, 6 months away from becoming an associate–they break up because he works too much and she’s not made any friends in NYC and so is lonely (this is probably the most realistic part of this entire book, how difficult California people find NYC) (I SAID WHAT I SAID)
– They go low contact for ~five years, during which Eli stays a banker i.e. is 28
– They meet and he reveals (no spoiler, if you’ve got half a brain cell) (which Georgia…doesn’t always) he just quit despite making VP recently and being on the “fast track” — so it’s February, because he was just promoted in January and it’s been seven weeks since he quit
Herein is my Issue, which only I care about and which you have to live with anyhow–if he’s really that much a hot shot he’s already been a VP for a year! You make VP when you turn 27, not the year you’re turning 29, Eli is a Bad Banker, and that is why he worked so much thank you for coming to my Ted Talk.
Other than all that, I enjoyed a lot of the passages of this book–Georgia’s worries about moving cities and all her friends forgetting about her and her not having anyone of her ‘own’ were both moving, uncomfortable for a singleton like myself, and also another total truism (California people leave SF/Oakland for a suburb and then you never see them again) (I SAID WHAT I SAID). But the imbalance between her and Eli was pronounced throughout–he’s been therapy-ing for a year, clearly in a better headspace, and so it’s just him being like “say what you want, Georgia” and her having a panic attack that she has no idea what to say.
So it felt like the plot was going to be he’s there to ‘fix’ her, but Joyce does sidestep that conceit by having Georgia decide to move to pursue her dreams for a bit before the HEA. But that bit at the end was just too short to compensate for the hundreds of pages before. And all of those pages cover ~8 days, whereas the last little bit where Georgia is getting her character development cover like, months.