By Sara Hailstone
Kate Spencer provides her readers with a novel of escapism with the allure of New York City with In a New York Minute. We meet our feminine protagonist, Francesca (Franny), in a moment of turmoil after she is laid off from an interior design job and makes her way despairingly home with her box of personal belongings. On the ride home, her silk dress is caught in the subway doors and embarrassingly yanked apart as the entire back of the dress rips, exposing her to New York City. Franny and a helpful pregnant woman try to piece the dress together with a hair clip when Spencer’s knight in shining armour, Hayes Montgomery III, steps in and offers Franny his expensive Gucci suit jacket.
In a humorous and plot-catching turn of events, Franny and “Mr. Hot Suit” are recorded by a bystander and the encounter goes viral on social media. What follows is a roller-coaster romantic plotline of crests and dips between Franny and Hayes. An opposites attract archetypal plot and folded in with pure humour and the enduring qualities of female friendship in the city, Spencer provides rom-com readers of the genre with a pleasing text that could be taken along as a feel-good vacation read.
Kate Spencer is well-known for her award-winning podcast Forever35, where Spencer and her friend Doree Shafrir navigate self-care for women with both comedy and wit. Her freelance work can be found in magazines like Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone, and Esquire. Author of the memoir The Dead Moms Club, Spencer’s debut fiction novel In a New York Minute gives off Sex and the City vibes, taking readers along on a similar escapade of love, sex, career, and friendship.
I enjoyed the novel as it offered me a moment of escapism that I appreciate from the act of reading. My one wish with In a New York Minute would be to envision Franny’s personal growth extending beyond the confines of the text as a strong woman who dove head-first into starting her own interior design business after proclaiming so on live television. I imagined, because of the exposure of the viral moment with Hayes, that Franny would be given opportunity and a firm list of clients to jumpstart her business in a capacity beyond the plotline where Hayes is her first client and in turn is responsible in helping push forward her dream. Witnessing a female protagonist step into that growth as an entrepreneur would have been inspiring and would have left a long-lasting textual impression on me as a reader.
Regardless, the novel flowed with personality and organically braided in the endearing and humourous aspects that having a circle of strong female friends can have on the quality of life for women—I appreciated that feminist layer of the text.
Thank you to Kate Spencer and Hachette Book Group for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!