From This Moment

FINALLY finished! It took me about five months to get through this book. At 2.75 stars, this was the biggest miss I've had in Camden's writing. The beginning was interesting, and the ending good, but the middle was just really flat and sloppy.

For example, at the beginning of chapter 8, it claimed that the finer restaurants didn't prohibit a woman from dining alone, but only cared if she could pay. That struck me as really funny, from the amount of ladies dining alone in older novels, and I researched a bit more. Ladies were excluded from men's clubs and were not allowed in the men's dining rooms in fine restaurants. They did have to be sufficiently known about society to enter alone; a chorus girl or seamstress could only enter with a man's escort, and was seated in the men's dining room, but a society lady would be seated in the main dining area where ladies and families dined. The purpose was supposedly to keep nice ladies from rubbing elbows with vulgar people. But all towns had their tea rooms and cafes and buffets, in much the same manner as we do today. Stella could have and would have eaten at these humbler sorts of restaurants while trying to maintain a low profile as a working woman while trying to solve her sister's murder.

Also, there were plenty of modernistic phrases in the middle...
Perfectly awful
Indulging in a tantrum
Go running off to
Mustn't let her get to him
Went under
Get City Hall to jump
Get her onboard
Needed to pull back

Yes, some of that is New York paper-boy slang that was just coming into use. Nice society didn't accept such slang until the Roaring Twenties; two people who criticize split infinitives in a sentence are not going to think it okay to use such terms. Those details really pulled me out of a story that I wasn't deeply immersed in to begin with.

It also felt disjointed between the Evelyn/Clyde story arc, the Stella/Romulus one, and the different magazine and mystery elements. The quarrelsome speeches particularly grated on my nerves.

Anyway, I kept laying it aside, hoping it was just mood, but ultimately I cannot say I loved it and will only recommend it to readers who love Elizabeth Camden...don't start with it if you are trying her out, because there are so much better stories in her list.

Still looking forward to the next book, though!