Voters select "Workhorse" by Caroline Palmer as the new book for Club Calvi!
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Club Calvi is starting a new book!
Congratulations to author Caroline Palmer for her debut novel "Workhorse" being voted the club's new Readers' Choice!
In a video message, Palmer said the book is a little like the movies "The Devil Wears Prada" and "The Talented Mister Ripley."
"'Workhorse' takes place during the early 2000s in New York in the fashion and media industry," Palmer said. "It was a heady time of smoking inside, expense accounts and black town cars. The book follows one woman, whose name is Clo, as she tries to find a way to fit in this industry and makes a series of more dangerous and dangerous choices."
Palmer knows the fashion industry well. She was the director of editorial, video and social media at Amazon Fashion until 2020. Prior to her working at Amazon, she was editor of Vogue.com for seven years.
You can read an excerpt from "Workhorse" and get the book below to read along with Club Calvi.
The CBS New York Book Club focuses on books connected to the Tri-State Area in their plots and/or authors. The books may contain adult themes.
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"Workhorse" by Caroline Palmer
From the publisher: At the turn of the millennium, Editorial Assistant Clodagh "Clo" Harmon wants nothing more than to rise through the ranks at the world's most prestigious fashion magazine. There's just one problem: she doesn't have the right pedigree. Instead, Clo is a "workhorse" surrounded by beautiful, wealthy, impossibly well-connected "show horses" who get ahead without effort, including her beguiling cubicle-mate, Davis Lawrence, the daughter of a beloved but fading Broadway actress. Harry Wood, Davis's boarding school classmate and a reporter with visions of his own media empire, might be Clo's ally in gaming the system—or he might be the only thing standing between Clo and her rightful place at the top.
In a career punctuated by moments of high absurdity, sudden windfalls, and devastating reversals of fortune, Clo wades across boundaries, taking ever greater and more dangerous risks to become the important person she wants to be within the confines of a world where female ambition remains cloaked. But who really is Clo underneath all the borrowed designer clothes and studied manners—and who are we if we share her desires?
Caroline Palmer lives in Montclair, New Jersey.
"Workhorse" by Caroline Palmer (ThriftBooks) $24
Excerpt: "Workhorse" by Caroline Palmer
I do not yet exist.
I am not on the masthead and, as such, I do not exist.
When your name is not on the masthead—which is the list, in order of importance, of who works at a magazine printed on the inside of a magazine—the workday begins earlier than it does for the other girls. There is no one to tell you this, of course, no official orientation, but the right kind of girl can sense it, like you can sense the weight in a yellowing sky.
I am the right kind of girl.
On this particular morning, like every morning, I stop to swap my shoes before I enter the office. I perform this humiliating task in a dank little inset I discovered during my walk from the subway on my second day of work, and today, like every day, I sneak a furtive glance down the street to make sure nobody is watching me. Then, I slink backward into the timid autumn shadows.
Next, I lift a pair of black high heels out of my large leather handbag and place them neatly on the sidewalk. I rest one hand on the cool concrete wall to steady myself before I wriggle a foot out of a black flat before (and with an almost astounding lack of physical elegance) I attempt to insert myself into the resistant leather of one of the high heels. Some days, this operation goes off without a hitch. Other days, the heel tips over and I must use my big toe—cursing, desperate, my armpits warming—to set it right again. This morning: I lose my balance, and my foot hits the ground with a gummy thud. I grimace, yanking it back up in the air.
"F***," I whisper.
I steal a quick look over my shoulder, only to confirm nobody has caught me out in this most pathetic act, and I try again. This time, I am successful: My damp flesh squeaks into the body of the shoe. Next, with my balance precarious, I lift my other leg into the air before I slide into the other shoe. I quickly bend over and, with two fingers, I hook the back of the flats lying on the ground and toss them inside my handbag. This, of course, is disgusting, but it wasn't until I arrived in New York over the summer that I discovered the actual "use case" for the soft cloth bags that came with a new pair of fancy shoes, which is, apparently, to keep the revolting things one walks through on the streets of New York from sloughing off onto all the items in your handbag.
The heels on these shoes are too high—I bought them off a friend of a friend who had purchased them at a Manolo Blahnik sample sale, only to decide they were too pointy—but I don't care: They make me feel almost obscenely able. You look very competent, the girl sagely said, handing her new shoes over for the bargain price of $100. Truth be told, they are basically impossible to walk in, but when I stand utterly motionless, I am nearly six feet tall and a force to behold. When they came into my possession, my very first pair of designer shoes, I bought one of those sponge kits from Duane Reade, and I buff the leather before bed every night to keep them looking new. Occasionally the heels get nicked on one of those metal grates that pock the never-ending flesh of the city, but I am diligent about taking them to the shoe repair storefront in my neighborhood because, in this fresh new world, I am learning it is diligence, not cleanliness, that is next to Godliness. Armed with this new knowledge, I now spend half my days placing girls into categories. On the train to work, I search for any small sign or signal of other people's failings. The girls with nicked heels or chipped manicures are lazy. The girls who cross their legs at the knee on the subway are trashy. The girls with big silver hoop earrings or skirts with handkerchief hemlines are tacky. The girls with Kors by Michael Kors bags are cheap.
Today, when I clip unevenly past a still-shuttered corner restaurant en route to my office, there is a paunchy, unshaven man aggressively washing down the mottled sidewalk, water blasting out of a thick black hose. He releases his grip on the handle at the last possible second to let me pass without getting wet. I don't look at him, and he doesn't look at me, but like dancers, we dance. It's strange: I am always unnerved by the odd, oppressive silence of midtown Manhattan in the early hours. Every footstep sounds like it has been amplified, but the actual people passing by me seem strangely insulated from the world, like they are incubating inside their own bubble, readying to be reborn. I look at them with a suspicion veiled as harried indifference, and they do the same to me. I push through the revolving doors of my office building.
The lobby feels sacred, somehow, glacial and hushed at this hour, as everyone shakes off the missteps of yesterday, shedding their crumpled old skins at the door. I pull a week-old
copy of The New York Observer from my bag and hold it performatively to my chest as I stride across the marble floor. I ride the elevator alone. The head receptionist for our magazine has yet to arrive, so I pull out my badge and let myself through the oversized glass doors. I am arriving to work at a magazine in New York City, I narrate. I am young enough that I still live in the movie of my mind without knowing that we always live in the movie of our minds. I don't yet know that we will never arrive anywhere. I don't know we will always think someone is watching.
I learn all this much later.
Excerpted from WORKHORSE by Caroline Palmer. Copyright © 2025 by Caroline Palmer. Reprinted with permission from Flatiron Books. All rights reserved.
