Book Review: Necessary People

SYNOPSIS: Story about Stella and Violet who are best friends who met in college. Stella is beautiful, privileged, reckless and loves the spotlight. Violet stays behind the scenes as the ever reliable best friend to Stella who can be counted on to clean up the mess, but also enjoys the perks of being Stella's friend. Violet lands a job in cable news in NYC, where she works her way up from intern to assistant to producer all through her own hard-work and determination. But everything is jeopardized when Stella, envious of Violet's new life, uses her connections, beauty, and charisma to get hired at the same network. Stella soon moves in front of the camera, becoming the public face of the stories that Violet has worked tirelessly to produce and taking all the credit.

THOUGHTS: I loved this story and how it drew me in. The relationship between Stella and Violet and how Pitoniak creates this world really pulled me in and I finished this in a few hours not relenting to put the book down. The layers of the characters as it's slowly revealed is complex and brilliantly presented. I loved the novel for its intriguing story line of the privileged and connected life versus hard-work and self-made determination, the rich and the poor, and seeing who will triumph is what kept me going and why I loved it.




AUTHOR: Anna Pitoniak

Anna is the author of Necessary People published May 2019, and The Futures, which was named a best book of 2017 by theSkimm and Refinery29.

Anna worked for many years in book publishing, most recently as a Senior Editor at Random House. She graduated from Yale, where she majored in English and was an editor at the Yale Daily News. She grew up in Whistler, British Columbia, and now lives in New York City.