Give Her Credit: The Untold Account of a Women’s Bank That Empowered a Generation

This disappointing debut from journalist Williams details the 1976 founding of Women’s Bank of Denver, which served women excluded from male-dominated financial institutions. In the early 1970s, Carol Green, who co-owned a Weight Watchers franchise with her husband, was frustrated by sexist businessmen sidelining her and decided to open a bank for women. Williams profiles the many women who incorporated the bank, but she focuses on Green and women’s activist Bonnie Andrikopoulos. The latter argued that the bank should prioritize serving marginalized groups regardless of profitability, while the former wanted to attract a wider customer base to improve the bank’s chances of financial success. (Green won out, thanks to legal minutiae.) Though Williams frustratingly omits information on her sources, the narrative appears to be reconstructed from the incorporators’ meeting notes. This makes for a lopsided reading experience, with some chapters indulging in excessive detail (discussions on the importance of finding a location with parking and whether to renew a lease option, for example), while other developments seem to come out of nowhere, such as the incorporators’ decision to hire Denver bank executive LaRae Orullian as the Women’s Bank’s first CEO. Further bogged down by hackneyed writing (the opening sentence reads, “A long, long time ago and once upon a time”), this is a missed opportunity. Agent: Jessica Regel, Helm Literary. (Jan.)