The Rules of Fortune
“A gripping novel about power, money, and secrets.” —Mindy Kaling
A daughter’s investigation into her family history threatens to destroy their legacy in a gripping novel about power, money, and secrets by the author of Token Black Girl.
On their Martha’s Vineyard estate, the Carter family prepares to celebrate. But when the billionaire patriarch dies right before his seventieth birthday, the media is quick to question the future of the multi-industry conglomerate that makes the Carters living legends. Amid the succession crisis, his daughter, Kennedy, is questioning her father’s past.
Kennedy is an aspiring filmmaker, and the documentary she’d planned to present at her father’s party begins an inquest into the life of a man she never really knew. A thoughtful outlier in an elite and fiercely guarded dynasty, she’s not interested in keeping up the appearances that define her impeccably poised mother or in the capitalist games her ruthless brother plays. Kennedy wants only to understand the origins of their empire, and the lethally ambitious man behind it. That understanding comes at a cost.
As a twisted history emerges, the fault lines in the family grow. Torn between morality and the promise of maintaining wealth, Kennedy must decide what’s most important—the Carter legacy or exposing the shocking truth of how it was built.
Token Black Girl
“With wit and the sharp eye of a woman who has lived through it, Prescod’s memoir takes the reader into the places and institutions of privilege where the idea of the token black girl thrives. Literally shrinking herself to conform to the expectations of those around her, Prescod’s experience feels both unsettlingly familiar and incendiary. This is an essential read to understanding how beauty standards and media industry affect Black women in America.”
— Gabrielle Union
Part memoir, part narrative nonfiction, Token Black Girl, is an exploration of the ways that modern media can influence one’s self-esteem.
Books, movies, magazines and social media actively cultivate cravings for acceptance, and have particularly negative effects on Black girls and women as they are routinely excluded and underrepresented. The recent months of 2020 have revealed a renewed interest in the ways that covert racism functions as a byproduct of white supremacy. This book dissects the insidious impact of popular culture by examining Danielle’s interpersonal journey in coming to terms with her racial identity when she fails to find herself represented in a way that is seen as aspirational to her white peers. She goes from media junkie to media puppet after laboriously pursuing physical perfection to become a fashion and beauty editor at some of the industry’s top magazines.
Consumption of messaging that establishes beauty hierarchies can be incredibly damaging in both the immediate and the long term. Danielle is so influenced by media’s suggestive nature that she becomes obsessed with optimizing her own appearance until she is trained to police herself and other women, doomed to redistribute the very same ideologies that proved so harmful to her. After 15 years of working in her chosen industry, Danielle overcomes her decades-long eating disorder and turns her critical eye off of herself and onto the factors that motivated her self-destructive behaviors. While providing an insider perspective to a notoriously secretive community, Token Black Girl includes suggestions on how individuals can improve media literacy and action steps to ensure that future generations are not subjected to similar conditions.