Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute

Celine has a “Steps to Success” board, a plan she has assembled to help guide her choices from ages 17 to 21, which she keeps pinned to the wall next to her bed. The board focuses on intense and challenging goals, which Celine feels a strong (self-induced) pressure to achieve. These goals leave little room for error, urging her to keep “flawless” grades and complete a “PERFECT” application to Cambridge. The board, despite its name, does not delineate actual “steps” for how to accomplish these goals, even extremely large ones like “4. ACE EXAMS AND GET THE GRADES” (55), which encompasses her entire university career. She also, over the course of the novel, comes to understand that the idea of “success” that she has outlined (getting a job at the second-largest corporate law firm in the area, with the ultimate goal of professionally outstripping her father) is far more about her lingering hurt over her father’s abandonment than any real aspirations for her own life and future.

While Celine eventually realizes that her “Steps to Success” board is misguided, there is one element of the board that continues to inspire her: her choice of role models. The board “has pictures of Katharine Breakspeare, advertising CEO Karen Blackett, and management consultant Dame Vivian Hunt—three of the most influential Black businesswomen in the UK” (55). Though the first of these three figures is Hibbert’s invention, Blackett and Dame Hunt are real-world figures. Celine’s admiration of powerful Black businesswomen is something that she retains over the course of the novel, culminating in the realization that she actually wants to be more like Katharine than she originally thought, as she is more interested in human rights law than corporate law.