Off The Shelf

The Paris Wife Paula McLain 314 pages "We were all on the verge now, bursting with youth and promise and little trills of jazz...Girls everywhere stepped out of their corsets and shortened their dresses and darkened their lips and eyes...Youth, in 1921, was everything."   -page 40 Hadley Richardson expected her trip to Chicago to be simple - as she was a simple girl with simple wishes. What she did not expect however, was to fall madly in love with Ernest Hemingway. After a speedy courtship and wedding, the newlyweds set sail for Paris, where the Jazz Age has already swept what becomes known as the "Lost Generation" right up into its chaos. Once there, Ernest throws himself into the novel that will become The Sun Also Rises  while Hadley struggles to balance the roles of friend, wife, and muse. All too soon, a deception more complicated  than either of them could have imagined, blows the marriage they had built on loyalty and love, to pieces. My rea...

Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald Therese Anne Fowler 375 pages "Lord help me, I miss him. I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we're ruined, who thinks Scott's beyond washed-up and I'm about as sharp these days as a sack of wet mice, Look closer. Look closer and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed." -page 5 When Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is young and beautiful at seventeen years old and he is a dashing army lieutenant. Scott immediately falls in love with her independence and liking for reckless behavior. He promises his writing will bring him fame, and it does, when This Side of Paradise is published in 1920 and earns raving popularity. Zelda, falling in love with his charisma and intelligence, quickly boards a train to New York City where they are married at St. Patrick's Cathedral. The years following are full of lav...