City of Girls (Unabridged)
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
The blazingly brilliant new novel from Elizabeth Gilbert, author of the international bestseller Eat Pray Love: a glittering coming-of-age epic stitched across the fabric of a lost New York.
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 pass into her sophomore year of Vassar, she soon finds gainful employment as the self-appointed seamstress at the Lily Playhouse, her unconventional Aunt Peg's charmingly disreputable Manhattan revue theatre. There, Vivian quickly becomes the toast of the showgirls, transforming the trash and tinsel only fit for the cheap seats into creations for goddesses.
Exile in New York is no exile at all: here in this strange wartime city of girls, Vivian and her girlfriends mean to be free, to get up to no good, to drink the heady highball of life itself to the last drop. And when the legendary English actress Edna Watson comes to the Lily to star in the company's most ambitious show ever, Vivian is entranced by the magic that follows in the wake of this true, true star.
But there are hard lessons to be learned, and bitterly regrettable mistakes to be made. Vivian learns that to live the life she wants, she must live many lives, ceaselessly and ingeniously making them new.
'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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A woman reminisces about her unconventional life in Elizabeth Gilbert’s exhilarating second tale. After Vivian Morris flunks out of Vassar in the early ’40s, her exasperated parents send her to live with her aunt, who runs a shabby theatre in New York. So begins Vivian’s adventure of self-discovery, which includes crafting showstopping costumes from tattered clothing, painting the town red with a lascivious showgirl, falling for a charismatic Hell’s Kitchen boy and working at the Brooklyn Navy Yard during the war. Reading City of Girls is a giddy pleasure—Gilbert’s lusty, independent heroine explodes the false and harmful dichotomy of “good” versus “bad” girls.
Customer Reviews
Loved it
Was so interesting set back in the mid 1900’s something different to the typical stories out there. Was an easy listen absolutely loved it and was read very well with the change of voices for the different characters