Book Title: The Heart of the Deal
Author: Lindsay MacMillan
Purchase: Amazon
Rating: ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Publish Date: June 7, 2022
Description from Goodreads:

Rae is in a romantic recession.

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 modeling 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.

Rating: 3 out of 5 stars 

This is a tough one for me to review. There’s so much in this story and these characters that I relate to and enjoy, but reading it has been a struggle. The marketing on this book is completely off and I think if I’d had the proper expectations going into this, I’d have enjoyed it more. As much as it presents itself as one, this is NOT a romantic comedy. It’s more a journey of self-discovery as one woman matures from her mid-twenties to her thirties, as she loses herself in a toxic relationship with a severely depressed man and later finds herself again (or does she??). Trigger warnings: depression and self-harm.

While I like the general outline of this story, what’s presented is way too long and trying to do too many things. It wants to be a modern love story that subverts expectations; a story about the unexpected twists and turns life takes when we relinquish the desire to control every little thing; a story about enduring female friendships; what it’s like to be a woman in an industry dominated by straight white men; what it’s like to love someone with crippling depression; what happens when you defer your dreams in favor of stability. These are all really interesting plot points, but many of them are only half-baked and the overall pacing is stilted.

Let’s take the female friendships. When we begin the story, Rae is super close with her college friend group—lovingly dubbed “The Scramblettes”—made up of Rae, Ellen, Mina, and Sarah. Ellen is also Rae’s roommate and hands-down the best character in the book, often the only voice of reason. But Mina and Sarah? I know next to nothing about them (except that Sarah is queer) and therefore don’t care when these characters grow apart. I can relate to growing apart as more friends settle down and scatter across the country, but due to the lack of characterization, I’m not personally invested in this particular group of people.

I do love learning about Rae’s career on Wall Street and am rooting for her to succeed. However, there’s something really irksome for me here. Ellen has a group chat at work where she and two other coworkers commiserate on being the only non-straight white men. They give themselves nicknames in the chat: Estrogen Employee (Rae), Gay Quota, and Token Black. The problem is the author then only refers to these characters by these labels and in context of these stereotypes, so the irony is that they only exist as stereotypes with no backstory, no character development, no real names. The exact thing they stand against in the novel is how the author has characterized them. 

And then we have the romance. Rae falls for Dustin because he seems to get her on a level no one else does. And at first, I’m game. We learn Dustin is suffering from severe depression; he warns Rae he intermittently falls off the face of the Earth and likely shouldn’t be in a relationship. As someone with depression, this depiction feels super accurate and I appreciate the honest representation. I applaud Dustin for being upfront about it and recognizing he isn’t in the right space to be with someone.

But unfortunately, Rae wants to save him. She falls into the trap of believing if she just loves him enough, he’ll get better. Ugh. As frustrating as this mindset is to read about, it does feel like a realistic mistake, one that Rae learns from the hard way. But this makes for a really sad relationship to read about, especially as Rae begins slipping into a depression herself (see: NOT a rom-com). And Dustin isn’t a rootable partner for Rae—he decides to ignore his own suggestion of staying friends and becomes Rae’s boyfriend, acting selfish and at times cruel, a boyfriend Ellen repeatedly and rightly reminds Rae is “taking advantage of her.” Cheers yet again to Ellen for reading the writing on the wall with this guy.

Which is what makes the ending so infuriating! Rae finally realizes she can’t save Dustin and the only way she can help him is to leave, to stop enabling him. Great step, girl! She moves back to her home state, negotiates a more flexible work arrangement, and gets serious with her childhood crush. Rae begins building a life with her new beau, but still feels something is missing. So she returns to NYC at age thirty with no boyfriend/husband or children on the way like she’d envisioned for herself at twenty-five.

But that’s okay, because she’s going to pursue her dream of writing. If it ended here, I’d be so, so happy! Like look at you girl, not defining yourself by your relationships to men, choosing yourself. But no. We just have to return to Dustin at the end, like I’m supposed to believe they’re soul mates. Gag. Looks like Rae’s set to undo all that personal growth—what a major bummer. And so, what could’ve been an empowering story ends on a disappointing, bleak note and I’m left wondering what it was all for.