Review – Hold On For Dear Life by Annelise Osborne
Synopsis
Hold On for Dear Life follows three MIT graduates who build a peer-to-peer cryptocurrency trading platform, raise thirty million dollars in a single night, and are forced to confront what they were truly building — through a market crash, a four-million-dollar secret trade, and a kidnapping.
At its core, it’s a literary fiction novel about idealism, hubris, and resilience — and the long, difficult work of finding your way back to why you started. Set against the backdrop of the 2017 crypto boom, it’s less a book about cryptocurrency and more about what survives when everything falls apart, and what it costs to find out.
Published June 2026, it’s the debut novel from Annelise Osborne, a capital markets executive who drew on two decades of firsthand experience in the world the book depicts.
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Review
This novel dives into the world of cryptocurrency, which I still do not understand!
Three friends from MIT gather forces to create a platform where money is transferred instantaneously to another person without the crazy user fees that existing platforms were charging. While I didn’t understand the mechanics behind it, the desire to solve a problem in the world is what binds these three friends together.
While the story does center around a new cryptocurrency platform, it is also a study of their friendship, dreams, hopes, and desires. While they work well together, they are not without their faults. They get distracted by life around them, but at the same time, they are meeting movers and shakers in their world and have amazing conversations. You normally don’t see that sort of thing because people want to keep secrets to themselves so they can create the product first or better.
I did find the writing to be short and choppy, but at the same time, it seemed to work for this book.
It is obvious that the author uses her background to bring authenticity to the story. While I have worked in finance, this was a new field for me, and while I still do not understand it, I have an appreciation for the platforms and what it takes to bring it to life.
We give this book 4 paws up.
About the Author
Annelise Osborne is a capital markets executive, author, and thought leader working at the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets. She is the author of two books: From Hoodies to Suits: Innovating Digital Assets for Traditional Finance (Wiley, 2024), the bestselling institutional guide to digital asset adoption in capital markets, and Hold On for Dear Life (Amazon KDP, 2026), her debut novel set at the height of the 2017 cryptocurrency Boom.
Annelise brings more than 20 years of institutional finance experience to her writing, including a decade at Moody’s Investor Service as SVP and Team Leader responsible for rating $400 billion in commercial real estate securities, and senior leadership roles at Kadena, Arca Labs, and Propellr, a FINRA-registered digital asset broker-dealer. She has been recognized as a 2025 Stevie Award winner for Thought Leadership, named to the Innovate Finance Women in FinTech Powerlist Hall of Fame, and speaks globally at institutions including Consensus, Davos, and the Global Blockchain Business Council.
Annelise sits on multiple corporate and academic boards and lectures at Columbia University, NYU, and William & Mary, among others. She holds an MBA from Columbia Business School and a BA in Economics from The College of William and Mary.
