Breakaway Books

Authored by Renee Ahdieh; Published June 2025; Fiction

⭐️⭐️⭐️ / 🏖️🏖️🏖️🏖️

Like many novels featuring the obscenely rich, Park Avenue has an ample share of fabulous vacation locales and little luxuries that make life easy. I only wish that it contained as many characters that I want to root for. 

In Park Avenue, attorney Jia is given the opportunity of a lifetime to become the youngest senior partner in her law firm’s history if she can win the account of the incredibly famous–and lucrative–makeup company Mirae. The problem? In order to do that, she has to resolve a messy inheritance battle in just a month before one of Mirae’s co-founders, and mom of the three heirs, succumbs to terminal cancer. As she races around the globe trying to trace funds hidden in offshore accounts and juggle shifting alliances, Jia begins to wonder if she really knows what she wants after all.

I will always enjoy the completely unrealistic daydream of flying around the world in private jets, jetting off to the Caymans or Paris on a whim, or taking a casual weeklong vacation on a yacht. How can one not enjoy such escapism? This novel offers plenty of tastes of this dreamy existence, and I won’t stop thinking about fine dining at thirty thousand feet anytime soon. But, unlike the Crazy Rich Asians series that the novel appears to draw inspiration from, it’s hard to root for almost any of the characters. I’m not sure I would characterize any of them, even Jia, as having that much-beloved heart of gold that my favorite novels feature. 

Unfortunately, I’m also not a huge fan of the way this novel is constructed. There are short interludes inserted every few chapters, authored by a Gossip Girl-like narrator, and frankly, it’s more than a little melodramatic and overdone. Similarly, the villainous father who is trying to hide money away from my family is unbelievably over the top–getting engaged to his daughter’s college roommate is several steps beyond “regular jerk” into Disney villain territory. In fact, most interactions between the characters are just a tad unnatural, if not totally off. Jia, for example, evolves throughout the course of the novel, but it’s almost too much: She confronts her immigrant parents about the oversized burden they put on her shoulders; she realizes that the ultra-rich senior partner position won’t make her happy; and she comes to the conclusion that she should be the love of her own life. All well and good, but any one of those lessons would be enough for Jia to learn over the course of the novel.

Park Avenue will let you enjoy the world of the ultra-rich, but I can’t quite recommend it for its lovable characters.