City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert

City of Girls: A Novel by Elizabeth Gilbert --- 470 pages including Acknowledgments.

From Google Books:

It is the summer of 1940. Nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris arrives in New York with her suitcase and sewing machine, exiled by her despairing parents. Although her quicksilver talents with a needle and commitment to mastering the perfect hair roll have been deemed insufficient for her to advance into her sophomore year at Vassar College, Vivian soon finds gainful employment as the self-appointed seamstress at the Lily Playhouse, her unconventional Aunt Peg's charmingly disreputable Manhattan theater revue in a working class neighborhood near Times Square. There, Vivian quickly becomes the toast of the showgirls, transforming trash and tinsel from a secondhand clothing store into sumptuous costumes for goddesses.

Exile in New York is no exile at all: here in this strange wartime city of girls, Vivian and her girlfriends drink the heady highball of life itself to the last drop. When Aunt Peg's old friend, the legendary English actress Edna Parker Watson, arrives at the Lily as a wartime refugee and stays to star in the company's most ambitious show ever, Vivian is entranced by the magic that follows in Edna's elegant wake. But there are hard lessons to be learned, and bitterly regretted mistakes to be expiated, which drive Vivian away from the life she loves and back to that bleak existence with her parents. Vivian learns that to live the life she wants, she must continuously re-invent herself.

'At some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time. After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is,' she confides. And so Vivian sets forth her story, and that of the women around her – women who have lived as they truly are, out of step with a century that could never quite keep up with them.

Elizabeth Gilbert is one of my favorite authors; even when she misses her mark occasionally, she never disappoints. This is a novel that could be called a 21st century feminist version of Tom Jones.  rollicking, sentimental, unapologetic and sexy.

Click HERE to read the review from National Public Radio.

Click HERE to read the review from Vanity Fair.

Click HERE to read the review from Vox.com.

Click HERE to read the review from the New York Times.

Click HERE to see the author promo on Youtube.