Jen, an aspiring young artist living with husband Jim in a non-hip part of Brooklyn, has just been laid off. In desperation, she takes an ill-defined job at the Leora Infinitas Foundation (LIFt). The brainchild of self-made celebrity entrepreneur Leora -Infinitas, this nebulous enterprise with an all-female staff purports to help empower poor women around the world. But Leora has an amazing way of turning every proposed project to benefit the downtrodden into a brazen exercise in her own self-promotion. Jen finds herself in the most toxic New York workplace environment since The Devil Wears Prada, all the while dealing with worrying problems at home and misunderstandings with longtime friends. Readers will long for Jen to stand up for herself, and finally she does, in a very satisfying conclusion. VERDICT This witty and sophisticated debut is a wonderfully snarky satire on the world of celebrity do-gooders. It is also the sympathetic story of a deserving young woman who finally gets what she wants. Happy endings for all, except maybe those phony LIFt folks. [See Prepub Alert, 1/11/16.]--Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Winter's debut novel offers an entertaining and smartly satirical glimpse inside a New York City nonprofit startup. Jen, in her mid-30s and a new hire at the Leora Infinitas Foundation (also known as LIFt), attempts to navigate the office culture of meaningless jargon, comically hollow acronyms, and self-congratulatory meetings about vague project proposals. Jen, who is by nature accommodating and eager to please, becomes conflicted as she realizes that the company is more concerned with appearances than empowering women all over the world, as its mission statement claims. Still, unlike her coworker Daisy, who is hilariously blunt in her mockery of the foundation, Jen is determined to please her superiors and succeed in her position, having given up on her dream of becoming a visual artist in favor of a stable income for the next phase of her life. She and her husband have been trying to conceive for long enough that they've devised their own code language for doctors' visits and fertility tests. But as Jen's job begins to affect every aspect of her life, she's forced to reexamine her choices, relationships, and aspirations. This is both a biting lampoon of workplace politics and a heartfelt search for meaning in modern life. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Work woes and fertility issues, female friendships and marital challenges are among the factors at play in this satirical novel.Some of the details of the day-to-day life of Jen, the overly accommodating protagonist of Winter's debut novel, will sound all too familiar to many young women: the cavalier (not to say cruel) treatment she receives at the company where she works, a vanity charitable foundation that purports to empower women while robbing Jen of her own sense of self; the sweet husband she dearly loves yet wishes was more of an economic provider; the college friends she feels closest to but can't help envying; the struggle to conceive a childin Jen's terms, a "hypothetical tiny future boarder"; and the squelched yearning for some kind of self-actualization, although Jen and her crew would probably dismiss the very concept as sounding too much like something Leora Infinitas, the TV sitcom star-cum-socialite who heads the nonprofit at which Jen works, would hold a board meeting to discuss. When she's not toiling away at her pointless jobher chief duties are writing memos no one reads; devising acronyms no one likes; and reading the heartfelt, meandering musings of the privileged women Jen and her caustic-yet-caring work pal, Daisy, have dubbed "the Judys"Jen makes art and is actually a gifted portraitist. Her work evokes the hidden, perhaps happy, perhaps sinister inner lives of her subjects, and over the course of the novel she finally begins to get a handle on her own inner life. While at times the story veers uneasily between the broadly farcical and intimately emotional, it gains momentum as it goes along. At a certain point, Winter's hold on the plot, her characters, and, as a result, her readers becomes surer as it leads to its satisfying conclusion. Half rollicking sendup of celebrity philanthropy and half meaningful meditation on marriage, friendship, family, and adulthood, Winter's curious, captivating novel seems to teeter at times between split purposes but ultimately finds a pleasing balance. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

JESSICA WINTER'S DEBUT NOVEL is a funny and moving commentary on that point in a woman's life when everything seems to come into question - sometime around her 30th birthday, when late-night ruminations go from the provisional and short-term to: Is my job completely pointless? I love my best friends from college, but.... I love my husband, but.... And that eternal chestnut, Do I want to have a baby? When we meet the novel's protagonist, Jen, she has "breached the threshold of 30 without yet crossing the Rubicon of 35" and has disassociated herself from her former identity as an artist when she takes a job at a feminist nonprofit. The foundation, called LIFt, purports to empower women as its staff squanders countless hours and resources brainstorming acronyms and catering to the whims of their celebrity boss, Leora Infinitas. This is where Winter, a features editor at Slate and a former culture editor at Time, really shines. Anyone who's ever worked in an office inundated with phoniness, passive aggression and a communication style heavy on duplicity will get a kick out of Winter's send up of LIFt's toxic environment and sugarcoated cruelty. Celebrity philanthropy takes a similar hit. At one point Jen hilariously refers to Leora's worldview as "Zen Rand," a "jumble of Buddhism and libertarianism," or "like a yoga teacher rewriting ?The Fountainhead.'" The noxious nature of Jen's workplace only worsens her already precarious sense of self, and this plays out most visibly through her relationships with her two closest friends. Meg is a successful lawyer with a picturesque family life; Pam is living the starving artist's ideal and somehow making it. Combined, Meg and Pam represent everything Jen wants but can't seem to grasp, her idea of having it all - mastery as a wife, mother, career woman, artist. Envy begins to surface, as it's wont to do when friendships that originated in college face the transition to adulthood. As if this weren't enough, Jen and her husband, Jim, are having difficulty conceiving a child. It should be noted that they want a baby but can barely utter the word. They go so far as to create their own coded language in order to talk about the entire process, which they call "the project." The potential baby itself is referred to only as a "hypothetical tiny future boarder." In lesser hands this tactic - writing Jen and Jim as self-protective ironists - could easily have fallen flat, but here it succeeds as a creative spin on well-worn subject matter (yet another story of a woman's struggle to conceive) while simultaneously attracting the reader to Jen's chumminess and comfort with her husband. Still, Jen secretly wishes Jim could be more of a breadwinner, and money is a source of great tension and strain throughout the book. Winter addresses it most directly and honestly when Jen reflects on her discomfort in regard to Meg's privilege. "Pointing out the size of Meg's home veered too close to talking about money; or, more precisely, it veered too close to gawking." Later, Jim criticizes Jen for never negotiating a fee for her artwork, and a connection is implied between Jen's uneasiness around money and her lack of self-worth. EVEN THE HEAVIEST scenes of financial angst and other tensions go down easily because of the novel's short, brisk chapters. So does Winter's writing style, which is full of tightly packed sentences that build on themselves, often ending in a kicker, like this: "Jen scanned the other women around the jade-and-walnut table, festooned with crystal-and-bamboo vases filled with fresh-cut gerbera daisies and flamingo lilies, selected at Leora's request for their air-filtering qualities and replaced every day, even on days when the conference room was not in use, which was most days." As the novel proceeds, Jen is forced to confront her relationship not only to money and privilege, but also to her art. It is this reckoning that will ultimately satisfy Jen's search for meaning and her yearning to create a new life. Her 30s just might not be so bad after all. CAMILLE PERRI'S first novel, "The Assistants," was published in May.

Anxiety and frustration are the dominating emotions for Jen, leaving her unsure of herself and the direction of her life. After losing her job, Jen finds herself working for a feminist nonprofit, LIFt, founded by the eccentric celebrity Leora Infinitas. Her coworkers are consumed by brainstorming vague ideas and acronyms for projects rather than developing the programs at all. Stymied by not quite knowing what her job entails, Jen is left drafting pointless memos and planning projects that most often never come to fruition. This confusing inefficiency in her workplace is coupled with her feelings of inadequacy and disappointment in aspects of her life outside of work, such as her struggles with getting pregnant and her reliance on amphetamines. Her relationships with her husband and two best friends are shaken and tested by her insecurities. Winter weaves a story of the ridiculous (and the serious) people and events that can be found as we reach a turning point in our adult lives. Readers who like workplace satire will enjoy this debut from Winter (features editor at Slate).--Smith, Becca Copyright 2016 Booklist