The Trade Off by Samantha Greene Woodruff #TheTradeOff #NetGalley

A brilliant and ambitious young woman strives to find her place amid the promise and tumult of 1920s Wall Street in a captivating historical novel by the author of The Lobotomist’s Wife.
Bea Abramovitz has a gift for math and numbers. With her father, she studies the burgeoning Wall Street market’s stocks and patterns in the financial pages. After college she’s determined to parlay her talent for the prediction game into personal and professional success. But in the 1920s, in a Lower East Side tenement, opportunities for women don’t just come knocking. Bea will have to create them.
It’s easier for her golden-boy twin brother, Jake, who longs to reclaim all their parents lost after fleeing the pogroms in Russia to come to America. Well intentioned but undisciplined, Jake has a charm that can carry him only so far on Wall Street. So Bea devises a plan. They’ll be a secret team, and she’ll be the brains behind the broker. As Jake’s reputation, his heedless ego, and the family fortune soar, Bea foresees an impending crash that could destroy everything if she doesn’t finally take control.
Inspired by the true story of a pioneering investment legend, The Trade Off is a powerful novel about identity, sacrifice, family loyalties, and the complex morality of money.

❤️🧡❤️🧡

Hi and welcome to my review of The Trade Off!

Ah, the Roaring Twenties, what a time to be alive, especially in New York City! Prohibition and speakeasies, flapper girls and the Follies, the magic of Coney Island, and, of course, a blooming stock market, Wall Street its beating heart. The Trade Off paints a colourful picture of what must have been a thrilling decade with seemingly endless opportunity to do whatever you wanted, to be whomever you wanted, to turn your rags into riches. Except maybe when you’re a poor Jewish girl with a brilliant head for numbers and much ambition, but neither the background nor the gender to be taken seriously… 

She’s tenacious, though, our Bea, and that’s a quality I always admire in a person, fictional or not. She works hard to accomplish her dreams, even if I didn’t always agree with the ways in which she went about doing that. There’s quite a bit of family drama. I couldn’t stand Bea’s mother for most of the book, and I wasn’t fond of her twin brother either. So dismissive, so secretive, so arrogant, ugh. 

The main focus of The Trade Off is obviously Wall Street. I did enjoy learning more about the stock market and Wall Street dealings, and the actual Crash of 1929. I don’t have a head for numbers – I’m no Bea, that’s for sure – and I will never be as fascinated by the financial market as I was by the history of lobotomy laid out in The Lobotomist’s Wife, but I was never overwhelmed or bored by the information offered. 

The countdown to the Crash felt like a ticking time bomb. The reader obviously knows the Crash is coming and it is inevitable, but most of the characters don’t. It’s really only Bea who sees it coming and her sense of urgency and feeling of impending doom rubbed off on me. As the crash, and the final page, came closer I found myself reading more quickly, turning the pages faster because I’d become invested in Bea and I was genuinely afraid of what the Crash would do to her and her family and friends. 

I found myself engrossed in The Trade Off before long, and I would happily recommend it to readers of historical fiction, especially those who take an interest in Wall Street.

The Trade Off is out in digital formats, audio and paperback on 8 October.

Massive thanks to Lake Union Publishing and NetGalley for the digital review copy. All opinions are my own.