This was one of those books that came recommended from a lot of different people. I usually avoid "popular" books (at least when they're first popular) and award winners, but this one kept on popping up on the old "what to read next" radar. After a long wait at the library, it surfaced ... and I devoured it in a few days.

Told from the perspective of Brooklyn native Katey Kontent (pronounced like the state of being), it details about 18 months of life in New York City in 1938. Now there are a ton of New York City memoirs out there. Most of them are as annoying, cloying, obnoxious and overblown as the city. (Full disclosure, I lived in Brooklyn and worked in Manhattan in my early twenties.) Like the final kiss in the Princess Bride movie, this book leaves them all behind.

Unpredictable, interesting, compassionate and real, The Rules of Civility is a bit Breakfast at Tiffany's with the gender roles reversed. It also explores the idea that “Most people have more needs than wants. That's why they live the lives they do. But the world is run by those whose wants outstrip their needs.” And where else to set a novel about the needs and wants of the haves and have nots but in NYC.

In a testament to the author's skill, I frequently forgot he was a man, writing as a woman. The only give away was one scene at the end, which started as a typical male fantasy, but luckily the author pulled a fast one, literally, and steered the plot away from the iceberg.

This is a Sunday-morning-with-coffee-and-a-cigarette kind of book. Bittersweet and smoky.