I decided to read Rumaan Alam’s Entitlement because I thought Leave the World Behind was an interesting enough story, so perhaps this story would be too. But no, Entitlement is just as dumb as its protagonist.

Entitlement is about a thirty-three-year-old Black woman named Brooke Orr who was raised in Manhattan by her white adoptive mother. Brooke attended Vassar and then worked for a few years as a teacher until she became disillusioned by the job and quit. She then gets a job working for an eighty-year-old white billionaire named Asher Jaffee who wants to give away most of his fortune before he kicks the bucket.

Asher takes a shining to Brooke and feeds her some bullshit about asking for what she’s owed and demanding something from the world. Brooke internalizes this advice and then spends the rest of the novel going on about how important her work is, like her proximity to an obscene amount of money somehow makes her a great person. She alienates her family and friends, begins abusing the company credit card, and does other inexplicable and illegal things, but what really takes the cake is when she puts an offer on an apartment she doesn’t have the money to purchase, all because she wants the apartment, so she’ll just manifest the money somehow????

It is so bizarre that this college educated Black woman, who lives in the US and who was raised by a single mother who advocates for women’s rights, thinks she has the same entitlement as a billionaire white man. Everyone knows the white man is at the top of the societal/economic food chain! And it is not a spoiler to say that Asher Jaffee is not at all altruistic and not worth emulating. He’s a dick, just like every other white male billionaire on this planet.

On top of the incredibly ignorant or narcissistic (or both) protagonist, the writing in Entitlement is vague at times and so it can be difficult to know what is going on, and the ending is completely unsatisfying. Entitlement feels like one of those books that excessively pretentious people wax lyrical about even though they have no idea what the meaning of the book is. This book makes me feel as dumb as Brooke because I have no idea what the point of it is, if there even is a point. I am never reading another Rumaan Alam book again.