The Heart of the Deal | Review
Publishing Date - 7th June 2022
Author - Lindsay MacMillan
Genre - Romance
Trigger Warning - Depression, Toxic Relationship
Ratings - ⭐️⭐️
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SYNOPSIS
The young investment banker is tired of being single in New York City. Deep into a quarter-life crisis, she's overwhelmed by all the external pressure to rise the corporate and romantic ladders at the same time. Feeling the biological clock ticking, she vows to close the deal on locking in a husband before her 30th birthday.
The Manhattan dating scene has as many ups and downs as the stock market and leaves Rae exhausted from late nights formatting spreadsheets at the office, followed by even later nights reciting her resume to strangers at over-crowded bars. She considers throwing in the towel, but her friends come to the rescue, continually boosting her up with ice cream and cheap wine that they share in their sixth-floor walk-up. Rae soldiers on until she meets Dustin, a poetic soul trapped in a business suit, just like her.
Rae starts to hear the wedding bells, but no amount of financial modelling can project what their future will look like. Will Rae learn how to free herself from the idea she had in her head of what thirty was supposed to look like? Can she reject society's narrow definitions of what success means in love and life and know when it's time to walk away? Or is she too conditioned to choose the "right path" to follow her unpaved intuition?
Moving, funny, and timely, The Heart of the Deal is the story of one woman's reckoning with life in a city, an industry, and a relationship whose high highs (nearly) make up for the low lows.
The Manhattan dating scene has as many ups and downs as the stock market and leaves Rae exhausted from late nights formatting spreadsheets at the office, followed by even later nights reciting her resume to strangers at over-crowded bars. She considers throwing in the towel, but her friends come to the rescue, continually boosting her up with ice cream and cheap wine that they share in their sixth-floor walk-up. Rae soldiers on until she meets Dustin, a poetic soul trapped in a business suit, just like her.
Rae starts to hear the wedding bells, but no amount of financial modelling can project what their future will look like. Will Rae learn how to free herself from the idea she had in her head of what thirty was supposed to look like? Can she reject society's narrow definitions of what success means in love and life and know when it's time to walk away? Or is she too conditioned to choose the "right path" to follow her unpaved intuition?
Moving, funny, and timely, The Heart of the Deal is the story of one woman's reckoning with life in a city, an industry, and a relationship whose high highs (nearly) make up for the low lows.
✦ﾟ━━━━━━━・❦・━━━━━━━ﾟ✦
MY REVIEW
I want to thank the publisher and Netgalley for an e-ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.
The Heart of the Deal is a debut novel by Linsay Macmillan and follows a 25-year-old Rae who works as an investment banker but dreams to be a poet. Our lead lady is in a "romantic recession" when she realises that she needs to be dating the guy she wants to have a future with at 25 if she wants to have a family by the age of 30. She finally, after so many tries at online dating, finds Dustin. This whole ideology was something that I disagreed with, and it sort of threw me off to see it as the beginning of the entire plotline.
Initially, I picked up this book was because, from the synopsis, I gathered that this would be a sweet Rom-Com that takes place in New York. But I was highly disappointed through the book because this book is not marketed as it is supposed to be. Instead of a sweet, fun Rom-Com, halfway through the book, it was revealed that Dustin, the main character male, suffers from depression, and after that revelation, the book takes a 180°turn.
What at first seemed like the relationship of movies turned into a toxic relationship where Dustin would withdraw away from Rae anytime he had depressive episodes. Rae seemed to want to save Dustin from it all, but it slowly turned into those relationships where Dustin started "feeding off" of Rae and even Rae herself became borderline depressed. Rae's best friend Ellen was the sensible one trying to make Rae see the Red Flags, and I loved Ellen the most throughout the series. I didn't particularly dislike the change, and it would have been a good plot if I wouldn't have gone into it thinking that it was a romantic comedy. The team should have marketed this book for what it was, and the change of mindset and expectations from the book might have made me like it and give it 3-4 stars, but I just couldn't.
In conclusion, I wouldn't be picking this book up for a re-read soon. I would recommend this book for those who will enter the book knowing what sort of relationship this is because every time I have read a book with a toxic relationship, I was already aware of the fact and went in with that mindset. I gave it 2 stars because I didn't enjoy the book to that level, and some of the things I did not like happened in the book.
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