If Giovanni Boccaccio Zoomed into 2020, was a lawyer instead of a writer, and spent copious amounts of time writing posts on LinkedIn rather than writing Italian Renaissance literature, The Decameron may have looked a lot different.

Replace the bucolic Florentine countryside with a fast-paced social networking site, the ten carefree Italian youths with fifty ambitious, hard-charging women lawyers, and The Decameron may look a lot like #Networked, the first book of its kind to emerge from the COVID-19 global pandemic.

#Networked is the much anticipated 20-chapter anthology written by 20 women lawyers who met through a networking group on LinkedIn in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Much like the framework of the Decameron, each chapter in #Networked is written by one woman describing both her individual and collective experience and role within the group.

The women’s stories touch upon many of Boccaccio’s universal themes of the human condition: human will, love, virtue, and societal tension.

Make no mistake, not all themes in #Networked transcend time, this is a modern anthology. The protagonists are all very much entrenched in 2020 with plenty of emphasis given to careers, work-life balance, and the best lighting for virtual calls.

The multi-dimensional characters also dig deep conquering topics such as infertility, addiction, allyship, feminism, and mental health. Their stories are familiar.

They are the stories of thousands of other professional women living during this era.

They serve as inspiration and offer hope that the pandemic wasn’t a time of destruction at all, but rather a time of opportunity and growth. As one of the authors wrote “It was the birth of a whole new me, or rather a whole new we.”