Welcome to Litsy!

This is my favorite book so far this year. There aren't enough characters to expound on my love, but here's a few highlights:
💛 This has been compared to early Didion and Patti Smith (and I would add Erica Jong), and given the late 1970s setting, this appears deliberate & brilliant.
💛 Kushner plays with pacing to accentuate themes of speed and time. It's fascinating.
💛 There were jaw-droppingly exquisite passages that I had to stop & re-read.

I tried not to, but I‘ll have to bail on this one (gave it 100 pages). Perhaps it‘s the timing. The plot is promising, the characters have potential but the writing feels clichéd and unnatural. It maybe unrelated (or not) but I read two pages of Ann Patchett and I can‘t stop thinking about that book now. #currentlynotreading

"A funny thing about women and machines: the combination mace men curious. They seemed to think it had something to do with them." Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

???

I'm all over the place:
🌏 The Bonneville Salt Flats in the 1970s
🌏 1970s NYC
🌏 1970s Rome and Lake Como
🌏 Rome and Milan during the first World War until the 1950s

#whereareyoumonday @Cupcake12

I won a book from #goodreads !

4.5/5
Well-written historical fiction about how war changes society and social rules. I found the characters diverse and well-developed, and I liked the evolution of the different characters.
While not everyone gets a happy end, it's still a feel-good book, full of humor. It offered me a perfect escape ;)

Immersive historical fiction set in an English tourist town just post World War I, as a competent young woman, a naturalized German citizen, and a now-disabled fighter from the upper class try to find their places in a changing world that's still chock full of classism, sexism, ableism and bigotry. Well drawn, lovable characters, lively action, and some slow-burn romance make it very much my cup of tea, but I was thrown by the ending (cont.)

#WhereAreYouMonday I'm in post WWI England - twice, since I'm also reading The Secret Adversary. It's a rough time but perhaps things are looking up.

This book was everything I want in a historical fiction book. A young woman in post-WWI England makes a bold new friends running Hazelbourne's Motorcycle and Flying Club who changes her life. It's a book about class and war and pandemics and societal change and feminism and racism/ xenophobia and so many other things. I absolutely adored it.