Learning Curves

December 12, 2005
In Townsley's latest bouncy novel, British 20-something Jennifer Bell navigates corporate and family intrigue with a mix of pluck and naïveté. Jen's divorced parents, Harriet and George, are at political and personal odds: George heads a management consultancy firm, Bell Consulting, and Harriet runs a leftish environmental firm, Green Futures, where Jen is a recent hire. After a 15-year estrangement from her father, Jen surreptitiously re-enters his sphere at her mother's urging. Harriet suspects George of involvement in a property deal bribery and conscripts her pliable daughter to go undercover at his 3,000-person firm, where Jen flies under the radar as a student in the company's M.B.A. program. She snoops for dirt until her father finds her hiding in his closet. While Jen and George (who's not really the "cheating, selfish, unethical ogre" her mother says he is) begin a rapprochement, Jen also falls for Daniel Peterson, an M.B.A. program guest lecturer and bookselling executive, and discovers that, despite her do-gooder convictions, she may have inherited a knack for business. But when news breaks implicating Bell Consulting in the bribery scandal, Jen must re-evaluate which parent she can truly trust. Townley (Little White Lies
) delivers a charming if predictable third novel.

January 1, 2006
Jennifer Bell never thought she'd be getting an MBA. But when Jen's mother suspects her estranged husband's company is behind a scheme to cover up misused tsunami aid money, she signs Jen up for a company-sponsored MBA program and asks her to do some spying. Of course, this undercover mission doesn't go exactly as planned. Jen finds herself falling for guest-lecturer Daniel and becoming more interested in her studies as a result. Then, her father catches her just as she thinks she has found some hard evidence to implicate him. The novel traces Jen's burgeoning relationships with these two men--a new love and the father she never really had. Townley shines at creating characters who are engaging and realistic. She falls a little flat when using business-school metaphors to frame situations, but readers will be too charmed by the romance and intrigued by the family drama to care.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)