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3 stars--It's okay, but I had some issues with it.

The basic premise is that Vivian, the 89-year-old narrator, is telling her life story to someone named Angela in the form of a letter.

I did love the level of historical detail included in this (mostly) WWII-era novel. Although "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel" took place a bit later, I vividly pictured the characters running around a New York that looked something like it did in that TV show.


I appreciated Vivian's sense of humor--you know she doesn't take herself too seriously when she claims, "The only two things I've ever been good at in this world are sex and sewing." No, I wasn't holding my sides or belly laughing, but I did chuckle a lot.

Through the bulk of the novel, Vivian didn't grow or change much, but I think that's what Gilbert intended. For the most part, we're supposed to take Vivian at face value. For this reason, the big leaps forward in time bothered me a bit. It's hard to tell how or why Vivian develops when big chunks of time are left out of her story.

The other really big thing that kept me from enjoying City of Girls as much as I could have is that the text itself was prepared sloppily. I was *not* reading an ARC or galley, so the English should have been nearly perfect. In my version, there were lots of stray commas that really broke up the flow of sentences. No one's perfect, but this problem was so prevalent that it had a negative impact on the reading experience.

In addition, the text was mostly written in American English, but there were UK spellings thrown in at random. Gilbert is American, and her narrator is American. I got a US edition from my US public library, so there's no logical explanation for the weird inconsistency in the text. Maybe Penguin was trying to cut corners in the editing department?

City of Girls gets a down-the-middle 3 from me because there are worse ways to spend a few hours. It's an okay beach read that won't make anyone think too hard.