Blending high-stakes economic intrigue with high-class family drama, Our Little Racket is a sweeping and immersive novel. Baker fully inhabits each of her characters, voicing each with depth and breadth. Though Bob is nominally the center of the story, teenage and tenacious Madison has the most satisfying story arc. Fans of Cristina Alger’s The Darlings (2012) and Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney’s The Nest (2016) will enjoy this engrossing and illuminating glimpse into Greenwich’s upper crust.
Among the targets most squarely in her sights are the over-groomed, over-educated, under-occupied women who have outsourced the care of their children and obscenely opulent gated estates to hired help ... Madison, at once unbelievably savvy and credibly vulnerable, takes her father’s 'implosion' the hardest, and her story dominates the book. It is the most fully realized — in fact, her perspective alone could easily have carried this novel — but also, in the early chapters, the most tiresome ... Our Little Racket, while it takes too long to get there, ends in just the right place and on just the right note. The bottom line: Angelica Baker is a writer to watch out for.
The novel is ambitious, if a tad over-long. It’s about Stepford Wives, or in this case, Greenwich wives, who prop up their driven husbands until the bottom falls out ... This is a novel of manners, but with bite. If this reader wished for more of a feminist rebellion at novel’s end, that would have been inconsistent with the passive-aggressive nature of these Greenwich women. Money doesn’t buy fortitude, grit or spine. In fact, at the end, money fails these characters, and these moneyed characters fail one another. The novel’s darkness is a reminder that money can’t buy a happy ending, either.
This graceful novel straddles the line between juicy beach read and book club fare. It all seems like it’s going somewhere bigger than it does, but in the end, a peek-behind-the-gates is enough. Everything looks good on the surface for these ladies, who careen from Starbucks to shopping to whatever charity ball someone is throwing. Underneath, there’s the anxiety of being replaced. They’re colleagues, as competitive as their husbands.
...the lifestyles and financial maneuverings depicted all feel generic; if this is an insider’s story, it doesn’t read like one. There is a bewildering amount of interior monologue from the five main female characters; the most banal conversation is plotted, managed, and second-guessed to a deadening degree, creating endless low-level tension that goes nowhere. On the other hand, potentially interesting plotlines, like the one about the nanny's boyfriend's connection to a wannabe investigative blogger who is stalking Madison, are underdeveloped, then tied hastily in a bow in the final pages.
Baker examines different facets of these betrayals from multiple points of view. As the teenager puzzles out her father’s actions and her mother’s silences, a personal, thought-provoking portrait emerges of the American Dream, complete with a web of visible and invisible cracks in the foundation.
