With The Other Beautiful People, Caroline Bock isn’t the first author to shine a spotlight on the entertainment industry. But instead of steering our gaze toward the glamorous, Hollywood-based, and yes, beautiful people most readers are all too familiar with, she asks us instead to follow the tight-knit team of regular folks behind the fictional Cinema Channel, a classic-movie cable outlet in Midtown Manhattan.

Unfolding in late 2001, post-9/11, the novel centers on Amy Greene, who heads up the Cinema Channel’s PR department. Like sports nerds who manage to make everything into a sports metaphor, Amy filters much of her own world through her deep knowledge of film.

On her relationship with her boss, Owen, she reflects, “I always wanted to be Katharine Hepburn, all sharp retorts, square jaw, and tight lips. I’m no Hepburn, and Owen’s no Spencer Tracy”

Looking around her husband, Jack’s, hospital room, she thinks, “We are being given the illusion of privacy — an enclave behind a curtain in a room with many beds behind curtains — a kind of Wizard of Oz moment where everyone is expecting the great and powerful Oz.”

And while discussing baseball, she and Jack have this back-and-forth exchange:

Why do the Washington Senators sound familiar to me?

You tell me.

Damn Yankees. Tab Hunter.

Is everything a movie?

Sometimes.

All the time.

Heh.

Above all, the novel is a love story. Amy loves New York. She loves her job. She loves classic films. She loves her family. She should be at the height of her powers, but instead, she’s torn. She and Jack have recently fled Manhattan and relocated to a Washington, DC, rental, and she now faces a daily three-hour commute (each way) by train.

Then, at the same time Jack suffers the urgent health crisis that lands him in the hospital, a competing cable network threatens to buy out the Cinema Channel. Suddenly, Amy’s work family and her real family desperately need her at the exact same moment.

In fact, Jack is barely home from the hospital when Owen calls, demanding to know when Amy will return to the office:  

“We miss you, A.,” Owen says, restrained, though in comparison to Gracie’s booming Ethel Merman voice anyone would sound measured. He must have that interior Owen look, the one that says to the office: Approach with caution…

“I want you to miss us.”

This push-and-pull from her boss in New York and her spouse in DC puts immense pressure on Amy. As a coping mechanism, she summons a ghost from her past — namely, her father, who struggled to raise her and her younger brother after their mother suffered a debilitating aneurysm when Amy was 6. She has full conversations with her late dad, receiving his unbidden advice even though he’s technically no longer around to deliver it.

Amy’s work and family are distinctly separate (physically and mentally) but both are equally meaningful to her. So, she ruminates. She weighs decisions carefully. There’s a lot of thinking going on. This makes for a very interior novel, which the author organizes into both extended and fragmented sections rather than cohesive chapters. It’s a unique way to tell a story, but I can imagine some readers feeling a bit frustrated with the slowed pacing at times.

My advice? Put any expectations about plot to the side. In this book, what Bock offers instead is a close study of how career and family can cut ambitious women like Amy Greene in two. It’s never didactic, however. The reader experiences everything Amy grapples with in real time. We’re in her shoes, feeling her anguish over not being everything everyone needs at all times. For me, that was powerful.

In the end, Bock has given her audience a novel about what it means to exist as part of imperfect and messy families — the ones we work with and the ones we live with. For Amy, that chaotic blend constitutes her life. Fans of stories that explore the nuances of the work/life balance — and those who love tales about the entertainment industry — will enjoy The Other Beautiful People very much.

Sarahlyn Bruck is a writing professor and the award-winning author of three contemporary novels: Light of the Fire (2024), Daytime Drama (2021), and Designer You (2018). She lives in Philadelphia with her family.