Park Avenue Summer by Reneé Rosen @BerkleyPub @ReneeRosen1

Park Avenue Summer by Reneé Rosen is available today!

Vibrant, inspiring, & empowering!

This was my very first RENEÉ ROSEN book and just let me tell you it just had me asking myself, “Uhm, how come I haven’t read any of this author’s books before?” I am definitely going to be checking out her other books, past and future ones that is for sure.

PARK AVENUE SUMMER by RENEÉ ROSEN is a highly entertaining, delightful, captivating, and fascinating historical fiction novel that immediately drew me in and held my interest right to the very end. Lately, with my books, I have been finding myself easily distracted and my thoughts wavering while reading but I’m happy to say that wasn’t the case here. I was fully immersed in this story and found the setting, characters, and storyline to be extremely engrossing and totally enraptured me.

RENEÉ ROSEN delivers an intriguing, well-plotted and well-written read here that captures place and time fabulously placing me right into the heart of this story. There was this perfect balance of fact and fiction that I absolutely loved and found so appealing. I was never too much of a Cosmopolitan reader and still not but there is this attraction, fascination and glamorous appeal to the magazine that I have always found intriguing. So I just knew that I had to read this story and find out how the new editor, Helen Gurley Brown’s vision for her “girls” reshaped the look and feel of women’s publications everywhere. I thoroughly enjoyed reading Helen’s story through the perspective of her fictional secretary, Alice. I thought it was very telling and an effective way to hear about Helen and her story as editor of Cosmopolitan magazine. This was definitely an engaging page-turner and one that had me rooting for the success of the July issue when it went to print and hoping for all of Alice’s dreams to come true. I am especially fond of Epilogues and I have to say that I absolutely loved how this one wrapped up. Perfection! 

Ok pussycats! I was definitely a Cosmo girl back in the day and I couldn’t wait for every new edition of the magazine and never missed one. I had stacks of magazines that I kept for years.

I read it from cover to cover and loved those very brazen articles which weren’t so back in my day like they were here in this story.    So when I got the chance at a complimentary copy I jumped at it. I didn’t keep all those magazines and I wished that I had now. It would be fun to go back and look at those titles and articles and see how they changed.

We meet the brazen, determined and ambitious editor of Cosmopolitan magazine Helen Gurley Brown through our main character Alice who becomes her “secretary” which was the title used back in the day. I am feeling kind of old here. Lol I enjoyed the dynamics here between the characters and loved just how ambitious both the women were. I was fascinated by Helen and enjoyed learning a bit about what the real Helen might have been like. I wished the story was focused a bit more on her and the magazine. I enjoyed Alice’s character but felt there was a little bit of unnecessary drama and a bit of a romance there which slowed down the story for me and left me rolling my eyes a bit. And this is where Norma and I differ as readers because she loves that stuff.

I enjoyed my trip down memory lane with this one and glad I read it.  I highly recommend.

Norma’s Stats:
Cover: Glamorous, nostalgic, beautiful and a fitting representation to storyline. I absolutely love the simplicity, classic and vintage feel of this cover. 
Title: Intriguing, fun and absolutely loved how the title played so fittingly and wonderfully into storyline. 
Writing/Prose: Well-written, beautiful, witty, fluid, engaging and readable. Thoroughly enjoyed the narrative, totally entertaining. There were even a few laugh out loud moments and some touching ones too. 
Plot: Glitzy, fascinating, atmospheric, sexy (without details), entertaining, and highly enjoyable. 
Ending: A goose bump ending that enveloped me with warmth leaving me with that ever coveted afterglow feeling of satisfaction that I just read a fabulous book. 
Overall: Wowza! This book gave me all the feels and it’s a huggable one that will stay with me long after closing the cover. Just fabulous and another one added to my Favourite Reads Shelf for 2019. Would highly recommend!

Thank you so much to Elisha at Berkley Publishing for our complimentary copies. It was an absolute pleasure spending time with this book!!

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Have you read this one? Want to read it? Do you love epilogues too? Drop us a comment! We would love to hear from you!