Customer Reviews

Hedge Fund Wives

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

How can a writer who has submitted work to the NYT, WSJ and FT cite Larry Ellison as the founder of Apple? Hedge Fund Wives was obviously written very quickly and the result is an uninformed, uninteresting read. I don't think the author really understands the lives of those she tries to portray, making the story extremely shallow and unenlightening. Her heroine belongs in AA, but we are supposed to think it's cool that she drinks so much alcohol and takes off her panties in public....twice. Yeah, I really believe she could start a successful investment firm and attract the most eligible bachelor in town. Right. Save yourself a couple of hours and skip this one. Feels like a lot was ripped off from other chick lit.

Is it really a surprise that the ultra-rich wives of hedge-fund executives located in NYC have attained levels of arrogance, self-centeredness, haughtiness, and maliciousness unseen in normal people? For the wives, there are a few pretenses at being sociable, but the men are totally consumed with financial dealings with ruthlessness and indifference, including towards wives and families, being their most salient personality characteristics. This entire way of life is so ingrained that even major financial losses scarcely evoke the re-examination of lives and thinking that would be expected.

This is the world that Marcy Emerson has been sucked into when her husband John takes a key position with a hedge-fund. Though being an outsider at first and making a few social blunders, this wholesome mid-Western girl is quickly taken by designer clothes and furniture, fancy restaurants, expensive art, and the like. It's funny/sad to see John and Marcy undertake a hurried and pricey makeover of their apartment towards ecologically oriented furnishings all in the name of establishing a unique "identity."

The social world of financial elites, as depicted in this book, is simply too exaggerated to be credible. It is a world of an endless series of events and gatherings that are only opportunities for displays of one-upmanship. People are no more than mere objects to be used, whether it is in the world of finance or in marital shenanigans. Marcy is a bit of a sympathetic character with a few redeeming qualities. She gains legitimacy with the reader when she corrects a wife over the use of "ubiquitous" versus "oblivious" though the other woman scarcely cares. However, her establishment of a wildly successful hedge-fund after a failed marriage in the face of a broad financial collapse keeps the book on its fanciful path.

Basically, the book is not a plausible look at a segment of society that most can only imagine. Little help here in gaining any understanding.

I enjoyed the idea behind this book and the story isn't bad. It's fun for a vacation or weekend read. But I found far too many typos & grammar mistakes for it to be a truly enjoyable book. It was more like reading an ARC version of the book rather than the finished product.

No plot / no depth of character / full of miss-information. This may be the worst book I have ever read.

Judie in Oregon

The best thing about this book is the title and the cover. The rest is false advertising. This book is not, as it claims to be, the tale of what happens to well-heeled Hedge Fund Wives when their husbands' businesses go belly-up. While the sinking stock market and folding hedge funds are alluded to as background, there's not a single moment where any of our characters has to do without or live in an apartment worth less than five million dollars. In fact, I wonder if the allusions to the floundering economy were added as a quick afterthought to make the book more relevant to today's times. There's a character, Gigi, who writes a high end cookbook whose book tanks because it's not relevant to today's economic hardships so she adds a chapter or two about entertaining on a budget. I wonder if Boncampagni was asked to do the same thing in Hedge Fund Wives because, really, her book is about rich women whose husbands cheat on them or are too busy working to pay attention to them.

Another major weakness of Hedge Fund Wives is the writing style. Each character is introduced with a long, Architectural Digest-like description of her home's decor as if that defines them as a character. In fact, the main character's husband, even describes himself that way - saying Eco-Friendly decor is what differentiates him from his friends and colleagues. The worst aspect of the writing is that the last few chapters feel more like a rough treatment/overview where key plot points are either glossed over or reported on after the fact. [...] I wonder if the author was behind schedule and had to take shortcuts to make her deadline, or was she simply being lazy? Or maybe it was bad editing. There are a number of egregious spelling errors, i.e. "calibur" or "personal affects." Clearly, someone was asleep at the wheel here.

Overall, I found this book unsophisticated, with one dimensional characters (i.e. the villain of the piece, Ainsley, is bad simply because she's bad), every bad guy gets his comeuppance, and every good guy attains complete happiness. Even a troubled teen with a drug habit makes a 100% recovery. If you're looking for a delicious read about rich New York sophisticates with well-drawn fully-dimensional characters and a beautifully woven tapestry of interconnecting storylines, read "One Fifth Avenue" by Candace Bushnell. While I never considered Bushnell a literary master, her work reads like a modern-day Edith Wharton compared to the drivel that is "Hedge Fund Wives."

My final analysis of Hedge Fund Wives - life is too short to waste your time reading it.

This book was so terrible I stopped reading it. And for someone who is obsessed with finishing most everything she starts, that is saying something. First, I could not get over the typos and grammatical errors. It is obvious that this writer and her editor both need to go back to school and shame on whoever hired them. These problems were so disturbing that they significantly interfered with my reading, every time you see such an error, it stops you short and, frankly, makes you think the writer is an idiot (really, what author uses "sites" instead of "cites"?!). However, I would have looked past that if I had cared one bit about the main character. Was she supposed to be likeable? or relatable? Because after she got drunk and stripped at a dinner party not just once, but twice, I was done. Were we supposed to find this either cute or normal? Because it isn't. I like chick lit but this book does the genre a great disservice.

The main reason I wrote this review was in hopes that the publishers read them and will make sure that next time, they hire someone who can write and someone who can edit and give us a halfway decent product for our money.

I would have to totally agree with Carin NY's review -- even as an airplane or beach read, it falls short.

Does the writer have to assume that a stupid fairy tale ending for everyone is necessary to provide emotional satisfaction to the reader?

And like others I was appalled by the errors in grammar and spelling - far more than one could excuse as "typo" -- I guess the editor was equally as brain dead as the writer.

There is "popular" literature that isn't so insulting to the reader's intelligence.

Marcy and John Emerson are new to New York City, previously living in Chicago. John was offered a nice position at the hedge fund trading energy derivatives. Things got off to a rocky start for Marcy: she didn't fit in with the other hedge fund wives, and the fire is quickly dwindling in her marriage. On an impromptu trip to Miami to surprise her husband at his conference, she discovers that he has been having an affair, but instead of trying to patch things up, he wants a divorce. And thus Marcy is thrust into the world of being a divorcee and trying to figure out who she is and what she stands for.

The plot was fairly predictable, but disappointing. I think Boncompagni could have done a lot more with Marcy's character. Although she is the protagonist, I never really warmed up to her. I felt bad for what she was going through, but I didn't find myself rooting for her. Although Ainsley is your stereotypical gold digger, I found her character more interesting than Marcy's. I didn't care for any of the other characters either (Gigi, Jeremy, Caroline...etc).

The end was too abrupt and unsatisfying. I'm not sure what the point of the kidnapping was, if it was literally two or three paragraphs. Lauren's character and predicament didn't do much to enhance the storyline. Overall, I wouldn't recommend this book, not even for a breezy summer beach read.

This book could have been much more enjoyable, were it not for the gratuitous and vulgar sex references, and foul language peppered through the story. It continues to disappoint me when female authors stoop to these levels to sell their books.

I bought this book for airplane reading and it was perfect for this. I skimmed through it during a San Francisco-to-Europe flight then happily left it on the plane after I finished it.

What I liked about it? Fun, mindless fluff that does indeed reference plenty of New York Banking Wives' favourite labels, haunts and habits.

What I disliked about it? Far more than I liked. The plot was entirely predictable. In the first chapter, it was already clear that the protagonist's marriage would end in divorce, and within a paragraph of being introduced to a character named Warren, it was obvious that he would become husband #2. And, the author is too lazy to even properly tie up the plot. The second last chapter finishes with our protagonist completely single and witnessing a kidnapping. Then, the last chapter opens years later and explains that she is now preggers and married to Warren, and that the kidnappers had been caught. Even in a high school creative writing class, this kind of hackneyed "skip to a fast forward" ending would earn a student a B- grade. Finally, it's quite unnerving that a journalist educated at Georgetown and published in the New York Times and Financial Times makes basic grammatical and errors and uses malopropisms throughout her novel. By the time the world "disinterested" was misused for the fifth time, I almost hurled my paperback at the nearest flight attendant.

All in all, okay for a beach read or to pass the time on a long bus trip. But, I'd get it from the library rather than wasting hard-earned money on it, since this book is definitely not a "keeper."