Book Review: White Collar Girl

Book: White Collar Girl by Renee Rosen

Source: Borrowed from Publisher/NetGalley for an honest review

Publication: Available now

Rating: 2 stars (Did Not Finish)

Review:

White Collar Girl was a book that I really wanted to like as it focused on a young woman in her 20s as she tries to go from writing the society pieces to becoming a full fledge journalist in the 1950s. However, I found it hard to connect with the story and the characters and the story tends to drag a lot.

I will say that the author did her research but the story does have a problem at times with overdoing it with the name dropping and referencing things that either will happen or already happened during that time period. I think the author has a way with words as well as being very good at writing but unfortunately the writing appears dry and disconnected at times.

Main character Jordan Walsh is smart and ambitious but as a character she's not very interesting and she sometimes has a tendency to be whiny. She does a lot of whining and complaining about not getting a chance to write a top story instead of being stuck writing the society section at the Chicago Tribune. That wouldn't be a problem especially given the time but she was complaining on her first day on the job without having proved herself. Yes, she graduated from journalism school but aside from collegiate experience at her school newspaper she had no real world experience.

I also couldn't tell if she really wanted that career for herself or to follow in her family's footsteps. A lot of her ambition is tied up in what happened to her brother who died in a hit and run two years ago. During that time he was an up and coming reporter at the Sun-Times. It's as if she's trying to fill a gap that's missing in her now distant family instead of this pursuit really being something that she wanted to do.

Things started to change somewhat for her when she was contacted by Richard Ahern (a man she met at one of the weddings she had been covering). He works for City Hall but is also a special aide to Mayor Richard Daley and wanted to do a quid pro quo of information. The information pointed to insurance fraud and supposed police injuries surrounding the 35th precinct. She thought this would be just what she needed to get a story on the front page since her other attempts were brushed aside.

Even with the information Jordan got from Ahern, everything was off to a slow start. No one was taking her seriously and she was getting no where with her investigation. But she carried on and the more information she found the closer she got to the truth.

The parts I really found interesting were when she was doing all the investing for the story. She had worked so hard gathering all that information and writing it up but typical for the times her editor changed the byline to her story to one of the male reporters without her knowledge. All that the male reporter did was retype her article and rearrange the order of two paragraphs but he didn't provide any additional information to it.

After moping around for a bit over the disappointment of her story, she stumbled onto another story due to an old college friend tipping her off to shady dealings at the state's attorney's office. But she couldn't write about it since her friend didn't want her to.

That story and anything else newsworthy that may have caught her attention was pushed to the sideline once she met and started dating Jack Casey, a writer for the Sun-Times. It didn't take long before they were talking about marriage but they didn't seem like a great romance to me.

I was starting to get bored with this story and reading chapter 15 didn't help. When Jordan got another tip from Ahern about an alderman committing automobile fraud using city vehicles, she worked hard to get the information and to write up her story but her editor didn't think it was good enough. That meant she wasn't able to get it printed in the paper and by the next day another paper had already beat her to the scoop. Also Ahern wasn't too keen on giving her any more tips.

This story felt like it was going from one thing to the next with nothing interesting me to stick around. It feels like I'm reading the same thing over and over with her getting excited about a story but then nothing really pans out. Maybe she will finally get a break and get on the front page but I really don't feel like sticking around waiting for it to happen.