Review: 'On the Floor' by Aifric Campbell and 'Bond Girl' by Erin Duffy

Two recent novels, On the Floor by Aifric Campbell and Bond Girl by Erin Duffy, take place in different decades, but their female protagonists have much in common. Both pound large quantities of alcohol and wake up with throbbing hangovers; they call their co-workers things such as The Grope, Pigpen, and Pie Man. And they live by the same credo: “There is NEVER a good reason to cry in the office.” They’re the new heroines of women’s fiction, and they work in finance.

The last generation of popular novels about women and work featured needier characters with jobs in meagerly paid, stereotypically female industries. There was fashion magazine underling Andrea Sachs in The Devil Wears Prada, publishing house lackey Bridget Jones, and, most famously, Carrie Bradshaw of Sex and the City, a sex columnist. These women scraped by, dating wealthy men to finance their well-dressed lives. Ten years later we live in an America in which women make up the majority of the workforce, Beyoncé assures us that we run the world, and Yahoo! Chief Executive Officer and ex-Googler Marissa Mayer can good-naturedly quip, “I’m not a girl at Google. I’m a geek at Google.” Different times call for different chick-lit archetypes.