AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! From the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and The Signature of All Things, a delicious novel of glamour, sex, and adventure, about a young woman discovering that you don't have to be a good girl to be a good person. "A spellbinding novel about love, freedom, and finding your own happiness." - PopSugar "Intimate and richly sensual, razzle-dazzle with a hint of danger." -USA Today "Pairs well with a cocktail...or two." -TheSkimm "Life is both fleeting and dangerous, and there is no point in denying yourself pleasure, or being anything other than what you are." Beloved author Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction with a unique love story set in the New York City theater world during the 1940s. Told from the perspective of an older woman as she looks back on her youth with both pleasure and regret (but mostly pleasure), City of Girls explores themes of female sexuality and promiscuity, as well as the idiosyncrasies of true love. In 1940, nineteen-year-old Vivian Morris has just been kicked out of Vassar College, owing to her lackluster freshman-year performance. Her affluent parents send her to Manhattan to live with her Aunt Peg, who owns a flamboyant, crumbling midtown theater called the Lily Playhouse. There Vivian is introduced to an entire cosmos of unconventional and charismatic characters, from the fun-chasing showgirls to a sexy male actor, a grand-dame actress, a lady-killer writer, and no-nonsense stage manager. But when Vivian makes a personal mistake that results in professional scandal, it turns her new world upside down in ways that it will take her years to fully understand. Ultimately, though, it leads her to a new understanding of the kind of life she craves - and the kind of freedom it takes to pursue it. It will also lead to the love of her life, a love that stands out from all the rest. Now eighty-nine years old and telling her story at last, Vivian recalls how the events of those years altered the course of her life - and the gusto and autonomy with which she approached it. "At some point in a woman's life, she just gets tired of being ashamed all the time," she muses. "After that, she is free to become whoever she truly is." Written with a powerful wisdom about human desire and connection, City of Girls is a love story like no other.

City of Girls was better than we expected it to be. The story of how a woman grows up through a wild life of theatre and clubbing in the early 40s did feature some quite good writing, and all of us praised Gilbert for having some good sentences in the novel. The characters were a bit of a mixed bag -- some of them, such as Edna, the protagonist's aunt, were compelling and complex individuals with strengths and flaws. Others were just caricatures who existed to fill some space in the story. But the main issue we had was with the plot. The entire story is hinged around a mystery of what the narrator's relationship is to the person she is writing this letter to, but the resolution of that plot both comes out of nowhere and makes no sense. In what story is it ok to introduce a character's role in the last fifth of the book and then have him be pivotal to the whole story? And the plot's takes on men is quite weird. Almost all the man characters are awful and the only redeeming male character is the one that can't touch or love anyone fully. I'm not sure what Gilbert is saying about relationships when the only solid one with a man is one borne from horrific trauma. All of this is elided over at the end of the novel when the narrator gives the moral -- everyone has flaws and you just have to accept those flaws to love them -- but when the flaws have the broad range of 'she doesn't express emotion well' to 'he stole all out money and almost killed Edna from alcoholism' the equivalency is both laughable and insulting. If you don't look too hard, it can be fun to read, but scratch the surface, and City of Girls just doesn't add up.