REVIEW: Soft Launch by Sarah Vacchiano
Dear Sarah Vacchiano:
This was an Amazon First Read and I will start by saying it was one of the most successful selections I’ve read – I have kissed a lot of frogs with Amazon First Reads and if Soft Launch wasn’t quite a prince, it was at least a minor member of the aristocracy. It’s not without its flaws but it was a fun read that really hit the spot.
Samantha DeFiore (nee Sam) is 27 years old and has just passed the New York Bar and landed a job at a prestigious white-shoe law firm in Manhattan. As the story opens, Sam is dealing with some heavy baggage – she’s just signed divorce papers and is feeling a lot of guilt and sorrow over the end of her marriage.
Sam grew up in Virginia with unhappily married parents who finally divorced when she was in college. The divorce had financial implications for Sam, who pivoted from her dream – drama school – to a safer choice, a degree in Political Science.
She also settled down young with her boyfriend Ben; they married when Sam is 22 (Ben is five years older). Bored by life as essentially a “DC housewife”, Sam decides to attend law school and go into Entertainment Law – a way of keeping her previous interest somewhat alive. By the time Sam is ready to graduate law school, she realizes that she can’t continue her marriage. She married too young, and she doesn’t want the same things Ben wants. He wants a child and she wants to move to New York. Breaking up with him is brutal, though, because Ben is essentially happy with their life and doesn’t want the marriage to end. Sam feels selfish and the guilt follows her into her new life in Manhattan.
Sam makes a quick friend in Charlie, who she, as a first-year associate, is obligated to share an office with. Charlie, having been an intern with the firm previously, helps Sam navigate the new world she’s entered and make some connections (vital to a first-year at a competitive firm). He also becomes a close friend (Sam also has a friend group from law school who are all in New York, so at least she’s not lonely).
Soft Launch has an interesting mixture of realistic and…not fantastical, really, but aspirational content. Sam seems pretty secure financially, and she’s able to enjoy what New York has to offer for a young, social person – lots of brunches and yoga and nice clothes.
She also has a lot of professional success very quickly. Sam gets the attention of an established entertainment lawyer in the firm and is chosen to help him on a juicy case. While it’s clear that she’s super-smart and hard-working, her rise still felt unrealistic at times. I kept waiting for some setback but other than a couple of minor professional mistakes, her transition to the big time is pretty seamless.
The case Sam is looped into involves a woman accused of running a high stakes gambling ring with celebrity clients – the story is all over the news. This reminded me immediately of Molly’s Game, a movie based on the real life case of Molly Bloom. It was no surprise to me to read in the author bio that Vacchiano was on Molly Bloom’s defense team.
There are aspects of this book that I specifically liked but that I can see other readers not liking (I may have skimmed some Goodreads reviews). There are a lot of mentions of brand names and of the food and drinks Sam and her friends indulge in (as young New Yorkers, they eat out a lot). I don’t always like brand mentions, but they felt organic here and helped root the characters in their upper-middle-class vibe. I am pretty prejudiced in favor of stories with a little glamor, and Soft Launch delivered there.
I also enjoyed some of the legal stuff – the book doesn’t dive in too deep on that but there are details about how Sam goes about researching things, for instance. I’ve never really given thought to whether that even interests me but it turns out it did.
The pacing in Soft Launch was off at times – the book sometimes feels almost episodic in the way it focuses on various aspects of Sam’s life without always integrating them. First it’s about Sam getting started at the law firm and climbing the ladder, then she’s dealing with the fallout from her divorce (a theme throughout the book that I felt Sam focused on too much – she acts like she has this scandalous past because a young marriage didn’t work out). Then we pivot to a romance (during which time her crazy work hours somehow seem to be less of an issue?).
There are some subplots that are touched on – one of Sam’s close knit group of friends accuses her of being a “bad friend” and a narcissist. (This felt both fair and unfair to me – fair because Sam does do a lot of navel gazing, but unfair because at the time her friend really blows up on her for not honoring a commitment, Sam is genuinely stuck in a work situation she can’t get out of. The way first-year associates are treated felt realistic enough to make me queasy.)
Then things blow up due to some pretty-bad decision making on Sam’s part (this felt very true to the sort of book this is, and while I cringed at the events when the occurred, it made sense that Sam had to walk through fire and come out on the other end for a satisfying ending).
It’s sometimes uncomfortable to read about how much Sam and pretty much everyone around her drinks. There is a lot of drinking and often accompanying bad-decision making. This felt very realistic but was still unsettling to read about.
It’s a bit hard to put into words what I liked so much about Soft Launch – I have a weakness for coming of age stories (sure, Sam is on the far side of 25, but I think this still counts); Sam is a really likeable if flawed heroine; I’m a sucker for the glamor of upper-class NYC lives; and it made me nostalgic for an earlier era, one where chick lit was just getting started and the female protagonists were a breath of fresh air to someone who’d read too many wide-eyed innocent ingenue romance heroines. There were echoes of various movies I’ve liked – Legally Blonde and the Devil Wears Prada come to mind, as well as Something Borrowed. My grade for this is an A-, and I really look forward to future books from Sarah Vacchiano.
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