Bright New Things by Anna Godbersen

Bright Young Things by Anna Godbersen is the story of three young women in New York City right before the stock market crashes. There are speakeasies, flappers, and people people at beautiful parties in this Roaring 20s-era novel.

This is a very readable novel. Our three main characters have very different experiences.  Letty and Cordelia travel to New York together from Ohio to try their hands at life in the big city.  They have a falling out almost as soon as they arrive, so we follow Letty as she tries to start a singing career and Cordelia who, it turns out, has a long-lost father living in the city. Cordelia quickly befriends Astrid, a wealthy socialite whose life is maybe just a facade.  I found that the variety in each of their storylines made for a fun, diverting read.

On the other hand, these characters really do make all the wrong decisions about dudes in the novel. This sort of upsets me because they are really, really dumb and naive. And maybe Cordelia and Letty have some sort of excuse for their naivete, but it strains the limits of my credulity that Astrid doesn't know exactly what's going on in her world in regards to men and their faithfulness or lack thereof.  I feel like Godbersen had the ability to make these young women make some challenging decisions in a positive direction and they always just were "woe is me, I'm gonna do the worst possible thing because I wuv him."  And I don't want to read that.

But read it I did. Because the grand settings were grand, the plot moved along at a nice clip, and Godbersen is sort of a genius with historical fiction.  So, yeah, read it.