Wednesday, June 29, 2016

What is Joy Callaway reading?

Featured at Writers Read: Joy Callaway, author of The Fifth Avenue Artists Society.

Her entry begins:
I’m actually reading a lot right now. I’m reading one of my critique partner’s contemporary YA manuscripts—it’s amazing—two historical novels, and just finished a women’s fiction.

On the historical front, I’m reading Hazel Gaynor’s latest, The Girl from the Savoy. I’m only about twenty pages in and already obsessed with Dolly and her adventures working at the famous Savoy. I’m also reading Jennifer Chiaverini’s Fates and Traitors coming in September. It’s an absolutely riveting work about the notorious John Wilkes Booth and the women in...[read on]
About The Fifth Avenue Artists Society, from the publisher:
The Bronx, 1891. Virginia Loftin, the boldest of four artistic sisters in a family living in genteel poverty, knows what she wants most: to become a celebrated novelist despite her gender, and to marry Charlie, the boy next door and her first love.

When Charlie proposes instead to a woman from a wealthy family, Ginny is devastated; shutting out her family, she holes up and turns their story into fiction, obsessively rewriting a better ending. Though she works with newfound intensity, literary success eludes her—until she attends a salon hosted in her brother’s writer friend John Hopper’s Fifth Avenue mansion. Among painters, musicians, actors, and writers, Ginny returns to herself, even blooming under the handsome, enigmatic John’s increasingly romantic attentions.

Just as she and her siblings have become swept up in the society, though, Charlie throws himself back into her path, and Ginny learns that the salon’s bright lights may be obscuring some dark shadows. Torn between two worlds that aren’t quite as she’d imagined them, Ginny will realize how high the stakes are for her family, her writing, and her chance at love.
Visit Joy Callaway's website.

My Book, the Movie: The Fifth Avenue Artists Society.

The Page 69 Test: The Fifth Avenue Artists Society.

Writers Read: Joy Callaway.

--Marshal Zeringue