Beatrice returns from her college freshman year still haunted by the death of her boyfriend senior year. His loss fractured the close-knit popular group they’d been a part of, but when one of them has a party and invites Bea she hopes by seeing the group again she can get the closure she so desperately needs. Instead, in Neverworld Wake by Marisha Pessl, the party takes an ... Read More...
April Reading Recap
April has come and gone and we’re once again in the middle of spring in Seattle—a welcome mix of rain, sunshine, and everything in bloom. Every window in our house looks out onto a gorgeous explosion of color whether it’s a crimson rhododendron outside my office or a front yard carpeted with pink cherry blossom petals, looking like the aftermath of some joyous ... Read More...
Mistress of the Ritz
I began this week with a novel that took place partly during World War II so will keep it clean and end that way. Except, Mistress of the Ritz takes place in the thick of it—Nazi headquarters in Paris, the Hotel Ritz. Author Melanie Benjamin is back with a historical fiction based on the life of Blanche Auzello, the wife of the Ritz’s director during the war. Blanche and ... Read More...
Hollywood Women: The Girls in the Picture
Mary Pickford was one of the first Hollywood stars, having acted from the time she was a child to not only maintaining her film career when silent moves became ‘talkies’, but going on to create her own studio, giving her and her partners the creative control actors didn’t have at the time. Frances Marion was a screenwriter, one of the first women in the business, who ... Read More...
The Swans of Fifth Avenue
Once upon a time there was a group of very special women who lived in New York City. They were icons of fashion and social arbiters of everything that was right about high society. It was the 1950s and they were Babe Paley, Slim Keith, Gloria Guinness, Pamela Churchill, and Marella Agnelli and they were The Swans of Fifth Avenue. So named by the small, witty, ... Read More...
