Park Avenue Summer

I knew I would enjoy Park Avenue Summer, because I love historical fiction, especially when it’s set in New York with landmarks and lifestyle just a little different from my New York.

Small-town girl and wannabe photographer Alice comes to Manhattan and lands a job as an assistant at Cosmo. I don’t really love plots where protagonists just stumble into super amazing jobs, but, ok, I guess I’ll roll with this as the entry into the magazine world. Caroline in The Best Of Everything is still the supreme example of all the career boosts just falling into a protag’s lap, but I always find it hard to empathize when an unskilled, untrained newbie’s entry-level job morphs a dream career by chapter three.

At least in Park Avenue Summer‘s magazine offices, there’s backstabbing and some more realistic credit stealing.  Helen Gurley Brown has just taken over Cosmopolitan magazine, which means most of the Serious Male Writers have quit, and so budget and advertisers have disappeared. Even though readers all know that Cosmo‘s about to become a huge brand for women, and Brown’s going to be a success, there’s a lot of tension as advertisers pull out and executives try to squash the magazine.  Brown tries wilder and sexier promotions to draw interest. Look, we passed around Sex and the Single Girl in the ’90s, so I can only imagine how racy and shocking it was when it was first published.

I don’t usually do content warnings, but there are some small mentions of disordered eating that made me feel a bit uneasy. There’s something about the gray area between highly disciplined good girls who aren’t tempted by fries and only eat healthy salads, and highly disciplined anorexics who aren’t tempted by food, at all, and only eat half an apple and 7 almonds or whatever, that makes me really uncomfortable. Helen Gurley Brown (and years and years of Cosmo) promoted and lived on weird, restrictive crash diets, so I absolutely understood why it was in there… but it still made me uncomfortable.

There’s a lot of small-town girl in the big city here, but it’s more charming than cliche, as Alice discovers herself and her strengths, and happens to witness the beginning of Cosmo.