In Elizabeth Gilbert's City of Girls, the year is 1940 and we are introduced to Vivian Morris, a recent college reject with no plans for her life. In a moment of desperation, her parents send her to live with her theater-running aunt in New York City. There Vivian meets glamorous people and lives a glamorous life not at all matching what her prim and proper parents would want for her. She gets herself in trouble, she makes big mistakes, and the reader is along for the ride.
The story actually begins as a letter written in 2010 to a young woman named Angela that we don't know, but who has inquired how Vivian knew Angela's father. Presumably the whole story is about a mystery man and his possible relationship with our main character. Unfortunately, the wild and romantic bits of Vivian's tale all occur years before she meets this man, but we hear all the details anyway as if they are of the utmost importance and then this father is thrown in near the end with almost no significance at all. Honestly, I'm not sure why we needed to know about him at all except that it gave the old woman an opportunity to talk about her scandalous past.
This book is long (466 pages) and at times a little slow, but there was enough interesting that I kept reading. And yet, when I realized that the first two-thirds or more of the book had all been the shiny object meant to keep your attention, but without any real meaning at all? Well, SmartGirl, I was kind of irritated. Maybe you'll like it more than I did. There is plenty of description of WW2 era NYC and of theater life and night life. There are some great characters. Sadly, for me the story fell flat.
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