Brooke Orr is on a mission to change her life and the world. Assisting an octogenarian billionaire in the quest to give away his vast fortune turns out to be deeply satisfying work, a noble life path. All you need to make the world a better place, it turns out, is the right ideals with the right amount of money. She and her billionaire make an uncommon pair: Brooke, 33, is a Black woman raised by a single mother in New York City; Asher Jaffee, 83, is a white business tycoon with an elaborate lifestyle. Each is exhilarated by the new friendship. Asher loves Brooke's willingness to spar with him, and Brooke finds her proximity to Asher's power intoxicating, even mind altering. As limits are increasingly pushed and unusual boundaries crossed, the line between need and want blurs dramatically.
Alam’s observation of the attitudes and trappings of contemporary upper-middle-class American life has a delicious precision ... The tone of this novel grows darker and more claustrophobic than that of any of his previous work ... Alam chronicles Brooke’s slow poisoning so deftly it almost seems possible that she’ll turn positive thinking and fearless self-assertion into some version of the American Dream.
Bleakly satirical, unnerving ... A...sense of dread infuses Entitlement, with its steady poisonous drip of racism, generational wealth, classism and real estate envy ... Entitlement’s final chapters move as propulsively as a thriller, but they can be hard to read ... Brooke...commands the reader’s sympathy and compassion
