Name: Sintia's review of The Heart of the Deal by Lindsay MacMillan
Item: The Heart of the Deal
Rating: 2
Author: Sintia

Lindsay MacMillan

Perfect for fans of The Happy Ever After Playlist and The Boyfriend Project, Lindsay Macmillan's debut novel deftly captures the feeling of being adrift in your late twenties. 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.

A Novel

The Heart of the Deal

Elli Barnette

I'd rather be haunted by failure than by not knowing if I would've failed.

Maybe love was always cliché, and anything too original just meant you were overcomplicating some knockoff to convince yourself it was true.

Genesis (@whisperingchapters)

Sintia

Thank you NetGalley and Alove Press for the ARC.

I really wanted to like this book and I thought I would when I read the description, but I didn't. It took me some time to read it and at some point I stopped enjoying it, I just wanted to see how it ends. 
I didn't like Rae at the beginning and her "dream" of getting married and having kids soon. She was thinking about this all the time and I felt annoyed. I get the part that the author wanted to show us what is in a way expected from a young woman, but we got a character who really believed in it and wanted to be married at some point. I felt like this was the main theme of the book. 
When she started dating Dustin she had all these expectations that he'll beat depression and marry her before she turns 30. The only thing I could see here is that she was hopeful that it might happen and it's okay to have some hope. I get the part that when you're in love you probably don't see some things, but you can't just beat depression. She wanted Dustin to get better, but she was making it all about herself all over again. She didn't  understend what having a mental illness is really.A good thing she did was to call Dustin's mum and in a way got him the help he needed. 
Her relationship with Stu was pointless because the chemistry between the two wasn't clearly there. She always loved Dustin and I like the fact that they meet again at the end.
Finally, at the end she decided to go for her dream to become a real poet, and we get a character development. All the things women face in business and any job they do was a good theme, but there was so much going on in this book that I felt overwhelmed at the end. There are so many topics, and good ones, about friendship, sexism, mental illness, relationship... You really do go through a lot in 5 years, but I feel like it was all to much.
I hope someone gets my review and what I'm saying here haha! 
Also, I hope that maybe someone will like the book the way I didn't.

Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &
The Heart of the Deal by Lindsay MacMillan

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Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &The Heart of the Deal by Lindsay MacMillan

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Genesis (@whisperingchapters) &
The Heart of the Deal by Lindsay MacMillan