"The Luxe" By Anna Godbersen

High society New York 1899. Gorgeous dresses. Proper behavior. Romance. Love triangles. Heaving bosoms. You can find it all in The Luxe. While this is in no way my usually choice of novel to read, there was so much buzz around it on the HarperCollins Reading Group on Facebook, that I felt I would be missing out if I didn’t at least give this book a try. And I’m glad that I did. While I normally don’t go for romance novels, or even books with any romance in them at all, I enjoyed The Luxe and had a hard time putting it down once I started reading it.
The book is centered around five youths of New York and their intertwined love lives. With all the she-loves-him-but-he-loves-her triangles that are in this book, it could have taken place when I was a teenager, or now, for that fact. It represented quite nicely the pain and joy of teenage love. The book was rich in detail, but I have to admit, not being anything near a fashionista myself, I tended to skim the description of the various dresses the females wear.
What I liked best about this book was getting to know the characters and seeing their interactions with one another. The characters were all well written and their actions were well supported by either their basic character or previous actions.
I do, however, feel this book would have worked better without the prologue. It gave away the “surprise” ending of the book. While I know The Luxe was geared towards youth, I think that anyone over the age of 12 would have been able to see from the prologue what was coming. And for me that took away a bit from the over all suspense of wondering what was going to happen.
I also felt that the description of the book in the jacket liner was misleading. (Spoiler alert if you know NOTHING about the book and have not read the jacket liner). I was expecting almost a murder mystery by the jacket description. But Elizabeth’s death takes place in chapter forty three of a book with forty six chapters in it. And short chapters at that. So I felt a bit misguided.
But that being said, I really did enjoy this book and am looking forward to the sequel. And with two friends wanting to borrow the book from my description of it , I highly recommend it.