Named one of Conversations Book Club’s 100 Best Books of 2012!
Welcome to The Great Recession, when companies are laying people off left and right, and even Big Law isn't hiring anymore. At least there's no place at Robertson, Levine & Shemke for 46-year-old Norma Reyes, a recent graduate from an unremarkable fourth-tier law school. Short on luck and desperate for a job, Norma accepts RLS's offer to work as a "floater" (i.e., rotating secretary)—a title that conjures the distasteful image of something stubbornly bobbing in the toilet after you flush. Though Norma's only trying to stay afloat until the economy improves and she can land a job as a lawyer, RLS's shallow, self-absorbed attorneys seem hell-bent on keeping this buoyant, middle-aged staff member down.
Then Norma unexpectedly meets Oscar, the firm's African-American copy room supervisor. Despite her misgivings about dating a divorced coworker with two teenage daughters, she finds herself instantly drawn to him. That is, until Oscar hands Norma a smoking gun on their third date—an incriminating tell-all memo from RLS's libidinous managing partner admitting to age and national origin discrimination in the firm's decision not to hire Norma as an attorney after her stellar performance as a summer associate. Though Norma dreads the prospect of taking on RLS's powerful brass, she and Oscar join forces against the firm while pursuing a fiercely tender and harrowingly intimate romance. But Norma soon learns that if she wants to hang on to a man like Oscar, it's not enough to fight the powers that be; she must first confront long-unresolved personal demons within.
Set against the contemporary backdrop of an ailing economy and brutal job market, The Floater tells how one tenacious Puerto Rican woman from the Bronx beat the odds in love, life, and the labor market.
New York Times best-selling author Ken Morris calls The Floater "the Rocky of legal dramas. Attorney and protagonist Norma Reyes--hired as an overqualified secretarial floater and forced to battle long odds in a high powered law firm--is often beaten down but never knocked out. Gritty and necessarily graphic, The Floater is a well-written and spellbinding ride through Lilly Ledbetter-glass ceilings and racial barriers. Shocking, uplifting, and enlightening, The Floater is a dramatic tour de force." Ken Morris, author of Blind Allegiance to Sarah Palin, Man in the Middle, Deadly Trade
Read more about The Floater in Houston Style Magazine! http://stylemagazine.com/search/?q=Sheryl+Sorrentino