Rules of Civility by Amor Towles
Published by Viking Adult on July 26, 2011
Pages: 335
Format: eBook
Goodreads

On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is in a second-rate Greenwich Village jazz bar with her boardinghouse roommate stretching three dollars as far as it will go when Tinker Grey, a handsome banker with royal blue eyes and a tempered smile, happens to sit at the neighboring table. This chance encounter and its startling consequences propel Katey on a yearlong journey from a Wall Street secretarial pool toward the upper echelons of New York society and the executive suites of Condé Nast--rarefied environs where she will have little to rely upon other than a bracing wit and her own brand of cool nerve.

Wooed in turn by a shy, principled multi-millionaire, and an irrepressible Upper East Side ne'er-do-well, befriended by a single-minded widow who is ahead of her time, and challenged by an imperious mentor, Katey experiences firsthand the poise secured by wealth and station and the failed aspirations that reside just below the surface. Even as she waits for circumstances to bring Tinker back into her life, she begins to realize how our most promising choices inevitably lay the groundwork for our regrets.

Hey!
I’m back with yet another book review. I read this book a a few weeks back, but just hadn’t gotten around to writing the post, so here we are. This was a read for the Paper & Glam book club, which I finally got around to reading. While I thought that this book was interesting in a Great Gatsby kind of way. I wasn’t totally pulled into the story. In fact there was a part of me that kept wanting Katey to wakeup and stop waiting for Tinker, even though they seemed to have a strange relationship that never quite got off the ground. She never quite does, though the book says that she eventually gets married to a man that can give her what she wants.

I would recommend this book if you loved reading the Great Gatsby and loved the imaging of the 1920s/ 1940s. I don’t regret reading this book, but I’m hesitant to pick up any more of Amor Towles other books.