Friends since their youth in Brooklyn of the 1950s, Margo and Angela have shared everything from wedding plans, to childrearing, to careers. Years later, when Angela's husband, a chemist and entrepreneur, recruits Margo and Kevin's son to run and eventually take over the family business, he promises to treat him as one of his own. But it is not that simple, as sibling rivalry, ambition, betrayal, and personal tragedies fracture the couple's friendship.
Impelled by her training as psychotherapist, Margo remains intent on peeling back the layers of the past paying close attention to undercurrents in the relationship that were either denied or ignored. Eventually she discovers the mystery at the heart of the rupture.
A riveting story, Hoops of Steel transpires against the background of the radically changing mores and expectations for women in the latter half of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The novel is a meditation on long-term friendship and what it reveals — in its profound ordinariness and in its extraordinary power to sustain and nourish two women over a lifetime.
LP Morgan on https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R25HU5GB0OK3DQ wrote:"Hoops of Steel", by author and therapist Marion Goldstein, is a novel about a family business that I could not put down.
Many of us have worked in family businesses; 27.3% of all businesses in the U.S. are family owned. Whether it’s a local diner run by four generations or a tool and die shop supplying parts for the local auto industry, family businesses have thrived and failed. Rivalries abound within an extended family over who owns shares, whose children will be employed, who gets special treatment and even who gets credit for designs or inventions. These kinds of issues can open wounds that do not heal.
But what happens when your very close longtime friend wants to recruit your talented son to run his family manufacturing company? Is your son able to thrive and manage your friend’s business which happens to include his own sons? What are the risks for an outsider? And more, what are the risks to the longtime relationship you and your spouse have had with the founders of the company? What business risks might pose a threat to your personal relationship? Does family always come first?
These stories that begin in 1950’s Brooklyn and end 40 years later in Princeton, New Jersey are told with the keen eye of a narrator who doggedly tries to uncover the motivations behind a father and his sons running a high-powered pharmaceutical business and the people directly affected by that business.
The book also closely examines the nature of friendship, especially those foundational relationships forged early in your adult life that may or may not survive. Can two Roman Catholic women who share the drudgery and the joy of child raising maintain their friendship through thick and thin? How much do we share or withhold from even our closest friends? What happens if your children’s decisions or behavior buffet and strain your longtime personal friendships?
This novel has a close to the bone feeling about the nature of friendship, business, and what is the meaning of success in both areas of your life? These questions are honestly explored and examined in a systematic manner by a very capable narrator in clear precise prose. I recommend this book.
Marion Goldstein's Hoops of Steel successfully draws the reader in with excellent character description and visualizations of what home, family and faith mean as long-term friendships mature and weather disappointment, secrets and subterfuge. Loyalty triumphs in this compelling novel that you won't want to put down: five stars!