A review by ramseyhootman
The Widow of Wall Street by Randy Susan Meyers

4.0

This compelling fictionalization of the Bernie Madoff scandal is told from the point of view of the scam artist's wife, "Phoebe" in this narrative. It asks (and answers) the question so many ask when confronted with such scandals: how could the wife of such a man NOT have known what he was doing? Is she guilty merely by association? We travel back in time to see the genesis of their relationship, the ways in which they fit together, for better or for worse, and we come to understand that Phoebe trusts because, at every turn, she feels she has no alternative. It's a compelling portrait of a woman entrapped by her own lifestyle, not by willful blindness but the almost incidental isolation of great wealth. We come to sympathize with her and see this as a very personal betrayal. Is she culpable? Should she be condemned? Read the book and judge for yourself!

I listened to this as an audio book and honestly if I had this to do over, I'd have read it in print. I reeeeally disliked the narrator - I'm not picky, so I didn't listen to a sample ahead of time - my bad. But she parsed sentences very strangely, and read at an excruciatingly slow pace. The good news is that this prompted me to explore playback options, and I discovered that the entire problem was solved if I simply set playback to 2x speed!