The Trade Off: A Novel

The Trade Off is the best book I’ve read all year. This is saying a lot since I finish about four books per week, and it’s November. Author Samantha Green Woodruff once again displays her gift of intertwining actual historical events and people with realistic and relatable fiction elements. Her first book, The Lobotomist’s Wife, blew me away, and like it, The Trade Off pulled me in with its amazing, inspiring, strong main character, Bea Abramovitz. This book takes place in the years before the great stock market crash of 1929 and leads up to the crash. Bea, a Russian Jewish woman in her early twenties and the daughter of immigrants aspires to become a stockbroker. She has the brain for it and can make calculations and predictions faster and more accurately than any man she’s met. Unfortunately, during that time in history, women could not become stockbrokers. As the crash comes closer, she tries to warn everyone around her of an impending crash, but it seems like no one will believe her.

This book is fantastic from cover to cover. The build-up to the crash will have readers’ hearts pumping in anticipation of what will happen to Bea and her family. The Trade Off is a truly magnificent and inspiring work.