Francine

Dazzling Daughter Of The Mountain State

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Pub Date 23 Jan 2018 | Archive Date 17 Sep 2020

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Description

Francine will appeal to readers who love strong female protagonists, corporate romance and intrigue, and international settings.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial breakdown, bright young Francine from a small town in West Virginia tries to find work at an investment bank in New York, but nobody's hiring. On the advice of her dad, she approaches an old friend of her father, Jim O'Hara, who runs a successful international mining conglomerate from New York and is on the hunt for a clever personal assistant.

Jim is impressed by her unconventional personality and quick wit, and Francine scores the job. She is quickly thrust into a frenetically paced corporate environment and rises through the ranks with astonishing speed. Her sorority friend Nancy Smith neatly sums up her preternatural talent for solving problems: "And you have that special gift of knowing what to do when nobody else does."

Smart and decisive, she faces company problems head-on, at home, and in far-away lands, unperturbed by setbacks and internal intrigue until she is confronted with a serious corruption scandal in China perpetrated by the company managers she trusted most.

This conundrum forces her to make dire choices. To her relief, she meets a man she once met before in awkward circumstances.

Can he support her in her lonely struggle to save the company?

Francine will appeal to readers who love strong female protagonists, corporate romance and intrigue, and international settings.

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial breakdown, bright young Francine...


Available Editions

ISBN 9781912732913
PRICE $2.99 (USD)

Links

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Average rating from 3 members


Featured Reviews

this was a really good read, the characters were great and I really enjoyed reading this book. The author was able to create a great story.

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I found this to be an engaging, informative book which will give you many insights into the mining business and its relation to big finance. There were many aspects of this that I didn’t know about and now feel a bit better informed. The story was fast paced and enjoyable. The characters seemed realistic and Francine’s coming-into-her-own in a man’s world was delightful. Thank you to #netgalley and the publisher for a copy of #francine to read and honestly review.

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This is an excellent look at mineral extraction and especially coal, following a firm based in America but with outposts extracting bauxite, gold and more from South American or Caribbean countries. Francine Boyers starts off in Central Park leading the single girl's New York lifestyle, but soon gets sucked in to the corporate world of OHARA, a major coal miner which is heavily resisting being made to cut back on pollution and carbon emissions.

I have never seen or heard the phrase:
"Birds are renewable."
This comes from the mouth of an environmentalist on the board, after he has been asked about wind turbines killing eagles.
If the author has heard this, and it came from someone promoting wind energy, it was someone who only wanted to build green power for the grants. Every environmentalist and naturalist I have read or heard has major concerns over birds being killed. In particular, apex predators are at risk and only reproduce slowly, taking years to mature and raising one clutch a year. No nature lover would dismiss this issue.

Other than that enlightening look, we learn plenty from visiting Guyana and Suriname, hopping with bush pilots, scaring off gold stealers, and sipping rum and eating beef curry with the locals. Francine grew up in a mining community in West Virginia and genuinely cares about people's safety, which is the reason why we can permit ourselves to take her to our hearts. She learns a great deal about boardrooms, stock reports and improving profit, as well as dealing with issues raised by a workforce in a foreign country, where the state might be corruptly run and foreign competitors jostle to extract raw materials. I am pleased that Francine picks a female lawyer and promotes her within the firm.

What don't I find realistic? I believe the author is being too kind in his reporting of a 99% male environment. I would be surprised if Francine never felt at risk anywhere. She doesn't have a date that she doesn't enjoy, and if she does anything for fun in New York, we don't hear about it; just work. This is telling from the male viewpoint even though our hero is a woman.

Regarding the title, as I am not American I didn't know which was the mountain state; I believe plenty of states have mountains, notably Alaska.

Plenty to chew on in this dense but excellently explained story of high finance and deep delving.
I read an e-ARC from Net Galley. This is an unbiased review.

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