AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER! From the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and The Signature of All Things, a delicious novel of glamour, sex, and adventure, about a young woman discovering that you don't have to be a ...

City of Girls was better than we expected it to be. The story of how a woman grows up through a wild life of theatre and clubbing in the early 40s did feature some quite good writing, and all of us praised Gilbert for having some good sentences in the novel. The characters were a bit of a mixed bag -- some of them, such as Edna, the protagonist's aunt, were compelling and complex individuals with strengths and flaws. Others were just caricatures who existed to fill some space in the story. But the main issue we had was with the plot. The entire story is hinged around a mystery of what the narrator's relationship is to the person she is writing this letter to, but the resolution of that plot both comes out of nowhere and makes no sense. In what story is it ok to introduce a character's role in the last fifth of the book and then have him be pivotal to the whole story? And the plot's takes on men is quite weird. Almost all the man characters are awful and the only redeeming male character is the one that can't touch or love anyone fully. I'm not sure what Gilbert is saying about relationships when the only solid one with a man is one borne from horrific trauma. All of this is elided over at the end of the novel when the narrator gives the moral -- everyone has flaws and you just have to accept those flaws to love them -- but when the flaws have the broad range of 'she doesn't express emotion well' to 'he stole all out money and almost killed Edna from alcoholism' the equivalency is both laughable and insulting. If you don't look too hard, it can be fun to read, but scratch the surface, and City of Girls just doesn't add up.