Our Little Racket audiobook

Longer than it needed to be, but strong enough to keep pulling me through the story anyway. I wanted less Lily and more Isabel--a fascinating (though uneven) character.

Inside an outsider’s world (Greenwich CT, Manhattan and Shelter Island NY; summer before/months during the 2008 financial crisis, and aftermath): Weighing in at roughly 500 pages, The Little Racket makes a big splash, unfolding around the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression from a psychological angle. Actually five angles: five women whose provocative narratives constitute character studies. A privileged, complicated bunch ripe for book club analysis as they’ve either remade themselves or are hiding something.Big in the sense that these women are as multi-faceted as the factors that led us to the brink of economic collapse in 2008. A financial meltdown and reshuffling that triggers their emotional volatility and instability.A big setting – one of the richest communities in America. The “false wilderness of Greenwich” Connecticut, where you’re whisked to a black sedan-guarded mansion: the home of a very rich CEO of a “too big to fail” fictional investment bank, Weiss & Partners. Bob D’Amico is so big he’s earned (and relishes) the nickname, Silverback, which “makes him feel big.” This shadowy Wall Street world is so big and convoluted no one really understands its “intricacies and machinations” – a big part of the problem.Big in its electrifying prose. Biting social and cultural commentary. Like the economists still trying to figure out what went wrong, these five women are not so easy to figure out. All emit a “Greenwich whisper,” but they’re not to be stereotyped as Angelica Baker’s keen prose presents them multi-dimensional and enmeshed like America’s financial system. And while her penetrating prose offers us a lot, it hints at more. Makes us stop and think about what these women are really angling for, what makes them tick. Since 99% of us have zero experience with this ultra-wealthy crowd, we’re intrigued. The novel grips in the vein of snooping inside their massive closets, out of curiosity not approval.So it’s also a big diversion for this blog as there aren’t any characters who enchant us. Some you’ll feel sorry for, sad for, but none you’ll fall in love with.Unless your idea of a wife (Isabel) is to be so perfectly put together you want to scream: will the real Isabel stand up, like the mantra of the TV game show, To Tell the Truth. Unless your idea of a mother is an “ice queen,” content with your fifteen-year-old daughter (Madison) feeling “like a spy in your own house.” Madison is convinced she knows more about her father than his own wife, blind ambition resembling a younger version of Ivanka Trump. Then there’s the nanny (Lily) caught between a simmering cynical dislike of the elite (she attended Columbia University on a scholarship; Ivy Leaguers all get their due throughout) and caring for her upper-crust charges. There’s also two featured girlfriends – Mina, Isabel’s and Amanda, Madison’s – thirsting to be consequential, when/if allowed.Mostly, you’ll likely feel a range of averse or, at minimum, ambivalent emotions for this tony lot. For their detachment, grandiosity, backstabbing, recklessness, falsehoods.Blame is a big theme. Who is to blame for the financial crisis? Fictionally, everyone wants to blame Bob. In real life, it’s not just Wall Street that bears all the brunt. What about the homeowners who took on the burden of mortgages they couldn’t afford? Risky for them, risky for the rest of us. For other causes, see:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmlhv...Similarly, Isabel, Bob’s elegant, “measured” wife consumes much of the psychic blame. Just because her house is so big there’s a separate wing for her and Bob doesn’t mean she should bar Madison and her eight-year-old twins (Matteo and Luke) from entering. Isabel is far from a hugger. She prefers to wrap herself in MOMA charity events and the like, leaving the heart of a family’s gathering place, the kitchen, feeling “as huge and cold and silent as a mausoleum.” Is it Madison’s fault her parents named her after one of ritziest avenues in America? Lily’s fault she’s the nanny but when catastrophe strikes she needs her mother?You sense the denouement at the opening: the summer before the historic crash when the D’Amicos are vacationing on New England-ish Shelter Island, a ferry ride from Greenport on the Long Island Sound, at the passed-down beach house of Isabel’s parents, not good enough for Bob’s highfaluting tastes. Another author might have opened with Bob’s bank failure. Baker lets us absorb the portending for 65 pages of exquisite prose that leaves some cunning on the surface and the rest buried for safekeeping.Safety is the name of the game for these uppity, insecure women. “Fragile bonds” mimicking the fragility of the markets. Everything is knotted up; we watch the unraveling. An enormous price must be paid for the enormity of greed and egregious behavior that allowed the dominoes to tumble down on Wall Street, right into the laps of these characters. Fairly? Unjustly?With all the animosity, anger, contempt, and injustice to go around not all the prose is gorgeous, intentionally. Notable is the vulgarity released from Isabel’s tightly-pursed lips, coarseness unbecoming of her old money pedigree. (The others are new money seekers.) Which is precisely the point. According to my count, three times this woman of “steel” exposes she’s not who she purports to be.Madison’s a lot like her mother. She has her “goddess features” and is stoically self-contained. A perceptive young lady but not perceptive enough. So when the undoing confuses her, she lashes out, rebels. A cry for help. Who is listening?Lily and Mina are. Though most of the time these two are oh so cool to each other, resenting the other, both competing for the fickle attention of this flip-flopping survivalist’s universe, where no one really knows whom to trust, or quite where they stand. That includes no one really knowing what Bob has done wrong. Plenty of resentment floats about.Lily’s betwixt and between. Generously (and appreciatively) employed by the family for years, her redeeming quality is she’s mastered how “to decipher Isabel’s moods to see how she could help the children to navigate around them, and then to withdraw.” We’d like her more if she too didn’t keep secrets, and take advantage when things fall apart. Her name befits lily-white Greenwich. Another anomaly for this blog. A lovely setting from the outside, but inside it does not enchant.You may like Mina the best. She agonizes over the choices she’s made for a lifestyle disingenuous to her Long Island roots. But we feel she must be partly to blame for her estranged daughter Jaime begging to go to boarding school (Andover, of course) at fourteen. Her husband Tom, a Princeton alum at Goldman Sachs (a fierce competitor of Bob’s as in these two don’t mix well), seems to be the cause of force-fitting Jaime into Greenwich Prep where she didn’t belong unlike Madison and her so-called friends. Mina is forever choosing Isabel over Tom, clueing us in on her unhappiness.Madison’s angst is the most painful. For she’s the most victimized, the most hurt. Devastated that people “gamble away the things they always told me were so important.”Which brings us to today. Banks are bigger than ever. Who is heeding the warnings to break them up? This isn’t just an entertaining novel, but an important one. Some pundits think we’re headed for another Depression. This tale was never about a little racket, but a great big one.Lorraine (EnchantedProse.com)

I wanted to give this 5 stars as the book covers topics that intrigue me and the author has a way of describing perspective from multiple individuals in a way that is unique. I felt like 5 perspectives were probably 1-2 too many to carry through the entire book. As other reviewers have noted, the ending seemed a little bit rushed however was very plausible. I would definitely read this again as I seem to gravitate towards books about the wives of financial titans.

This is a world I never thought I'd want to read an essay about, let alone a 500 page novel. But this author drew me in with her sharp observations and the way she made me care about these characters while never once letting them off the hook for their faults. I especially liked the way she told certain key events from multiple character's viewpoints. Not just their reactions, but what they thought in the exact moment she'd just highlighted through someone else's narrative. I've never read a book where an aurhor did that and I found it very effective. Ultimately, there aren't a lot of people to root for here, but it's fascinating enough to keep you gripped until the end.

Angelica Baker's "Our Little Racket" is one of the most entertaining and engrossing novels that I've rad in a long, long time. It takes place in "preppy," rich and "snooty" Greenwich, Connecticut. The book centers around the D'Amico family, mainly Bob, the father of four children, and the CE) of an Investment Bank on Wall street. The book takes place in 2008 when the stock market almost crashed.Other families in Greenwich who appear in "Our Little Racket" are the neighbors who had been hired to work in Bob's firm.When the company fails, we see how the once neighborly and friendly town starts to reject the D'Amico family, his children at college and mainly his daughter, Madison, who is still in High School. We see how Bob's wife "disappears" to bed for many months, and that she leaves the struggles of Madison and her two twin boys, who are around 7 years-of age to the Nanny, Lily, who it appears, "came from the other side of the Greenwich tracks" has this job as payback to a favor that she once did for Bob. Madison seems to be the major character in the book, trying to cope with how the people in town start to reject her, and the change in her parents' feelings. (Which could be interpreted as "they don't care," and she starts to prove this as the book progresses. With all her friends turning against her, Madison starts skipping classes, traveling into New York by train to visit the bars in the Wall Street neighborhoods to try to find a reason as to what really happens. We also see at the beginning that Madison's older sister stops coming home from college during the Christmas and Spring breaks. At lease Madison has Lily on her side....And Lily hopes that Madison and her mother can "work things out."Highly recommended! A real page turner! A "modern" Peyton Place.Laura Cobrinik,Boonton Township, NJ

i thought this was just going to be some fluffy gossip for the subway commute, but it was so well written and had thoughtfully composed characters - and just the right amount of gossip.

I really enjoyed Our Little Racket! The scandal, gossip, and back-stabbing played out by the wealthy elite makes the novel a fun summer read, but it is also a unique and thoughtful view of the financial crisis fallout. And I love the compelling portrayal of the relationships among the five women it follows, and how they each consider their options and their own self-preservation...

smart, subtle and quietly disturbing. the opening of blue velvet in book form: a slow zoom-in on some handsomely manicured lawns that doesn't stop until you see everything rotting just beneath the surface. a must read for ppl interested in contemporary fiction.

Beautifully written and rendered.

I loved this book from beginning to end! Great characters.

A family deals with the fallout once the powerful patriarch is accused of shady investments.Bob, a ridiculously wealthy Bernie Madoff-life figure, has just been accused of shady business dealings. He’s suddenly out of a job, facing the possibility of jail time, and might lose the millions and millions of dollars he’s madeThe “little racket” can have dual meanings.Of course, there’s the racket from Bob’s financial dealings. The big scam. He’s accused of cheating a lot of people out of a lot of money.But the significant racket of this book is the little noise the women of his life make, in their little worlds as they deal with their little tragedies in the fallout.Of course, their lives aren’t in reality little. To Bob and to the public, though, they’re insignificant; little more than objects of gossip. Baker draws each character’s role with beautiful depth.And then there are the jerky onlookers. Taking advantage of their vulnerabilities, forming new cliques, and gossiping, gossipping, gossipping.(view spoiler)[The real enemy comes from inside the home’s walls, though. The family isn't really a family at all when they need each other the most. In the end, they cheat each other.They don’t rise to the challenge. They succumb to it. (hide spoiler)]It’s a tense and sad look at a family under duress. Read Remark Reviews | YouTube | Twitter | Pinterest

I always enjoy a great book about wealthy people and the lifestyles they live that I have never known and never will. Our Little Racket is set during the economic downfall of 2008, with mention, of course, of Bernie Madoff. On the surface, the story appears to be about Bob, the head of Weiss Banking and his contribution to the crash of 2008. But, the book is also about Bob's wife, Isabel, and their daughter, Madison. Isabel came from money, had her own money and didn't really "need" an outsider like Bob to support the lifestyle to which she has become accustomed. As their world comes crashing in, the relationship (which never really existed) between Isabel and her teenage daughter becomes more abrasive. The Greenwich, Connecticut glitz, the houses, the clothing - its all there and all at risk of being lost, due to Bob's deceitful business practices. I won't reveal the ending - it was not what I expected, but tension-filled, nonetheless.

This is one of the best novels I’ve read in a while. Depicting the life of an ultra wealthy family in Greenwich CT during the financial crisis whose patriarch was the head of a bank which suddenly fails at the beginning of the novel and becomes a scapegoat of the industry. The inside look of this privileged life felt very genuine and the views from the multiple women in this world who had to deal with the fallout from their association with the father, esp teen daughter Madison, wife Isabel and nanny Lily were utterly believable, unexpectedly relatable and often heartbreaking. Angelica Baker’s writing is simple yet intelligent and beautiful and I enjoyed every second of it! Can’t wait for her next book .

I enjoyed Our Little Racket and would rate it 3.5-4 stars. It's a good story with interesting characters. I felt like it was a little long though and tried to weave together stories for so many characters that at parts I found myself wondering on which characters I was supposed to focus and what parts of the plot were really going to develop into something in the end. The author does a great job illustrating how a bad situation affects everyone in a family and many people in their sphere, but it just could have been a little tighter.