The Social Graces by Renee Rosen – 400 pages
ARC from Berkley Books, Netgally and author for an honest review.
Book Blurb:
In the glittering world of Manhattan’s upper crust, where wives turn a blind eye to husbands’ infidelities, and women have few rights and even less independence, society is everything. The more celebrated the hostess, the more powerful the woman. And none is more powerful than Caroline Astor—the Mrs. Astor.
But times are changing.
Alva Vanderbilt has recently married into one of America’s richest families. But what good is money when society refuses to acknowledge you? Alva, who knows what it is to have nothing, will do whatever it takes to have everything. Sweeping three decades and based on true events, this is a gripping novel about two fascinating, complicated women going head to head, behaving badly, and discovering what’s truly at stake.
My Review: 4.5 stars
The Social Graces brought the gilded age to full living color as the lives of Caroline Astor and Alva Vanderbilt are brought to the pages. Admittedly and slightly embarrassingly, I knew very little detail about these women. Honestly, regarding the Astor family, I was aware that the Astoria Hotel was an Astor owned property at some point and as far as the Vanderbilt family is concerned, I knew about Gloria Vanderbilt and her son Anderson. I had a planned trip to the Vanderbilt Mansion in Asheville, North Carolina in May of 2020, but of course, that was canceled by Covid. I knew I was in store for a lot of Vanderbilt family history while there.
Rosen knows how to knit a story and bring her characters to life. Her details about how the women dressed, what they ate, how they decorated and how they manipulated one another kept the pages turning. In this book, she used a Greek chorus to deliver overall details that worked seamlessly. The most outrageous but true details surrounded the soiree’s the women planned. The flashiest and most decadent themed parties were planned. If you’re anything like me, you’ll look up some of their crazy antics to confirm if they were real…seriously, the truth was crazier than fiction.
The theme of new money versus old money was present throughout the book and sadly, I don’t think that stigma has gone away, even now, hundreds of years later. It’s crazy that money inherited was acceptable, and money that was made through hard work was considered gauche.
This book reads quickly and will give you a lot to think about regarding how far women have come since the suffrage movement, which is also a part of this satisfying and engaging story. Kudos to Rosen for once again bringing powerful, historical women to light through the power of fiction.
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