I LOVED THIS BOOK! I know, all caps. But necessary, I swear. I was prepared in every way to hate this book. I only bought it to get Amazon's 4-for-3 deal to work (which is exactly what they want, right? You unnecessarily buy more just to make it all cheaper?). So in any event, I was unprepared for how much I completely LOVED it.

I mean, Edith Wharton is one of my favorite authors, so I was expecting that the obvious high-concept premise here (Gossip Girl + Old New York = The Luxe) was going to be horrible. You know, that Alloy was like, "rather than just referencing The House of Mirth, let's set a series in it!" It wasn't -- embarrassingly, I apparently love a highly class-stratified old-time-y city full of amazing dresses and impeccable manners (and calling cards! Swoon!) no matter who's writing about it.

Even in spite of that, I was worried the dialogue and action would feel all wrong -- in other words, the Sofia Coppola Marie Antoinette issue. Instead of writing period dialogue, just go with how teenagers talk now and then call it an artistic choice. However, this book shockingly pulled off a reasonable mix of both. In public and in formal situations, the dialogue is pitch-perfect. But in private situations, everyone speaks much more informally. Possibly a bit of a stretch (I'm a real stickler for these things -- I mean, I didn't find it plausible when a maid said "Oops"), but a pretty good way of dealing with this in my opinion.

The only elements that didn't ring true for me were the many social climbing pretensions of the servants -- yes, there are novels from around that time that certainly focus on this sort of thing, but I still felt like the help in this type of social milieu would be wayyy less open about this. They try to explain this by them all having played together as children, but I wasn't 100% convinced that this would be realistic either. I feel like when these types of upper crusters have someone wet-nurse a baby, it's like "too bad for your own kid" not like, "no go ahead, deal with them together."

Also, I didn't really care for the main character -- she's sort of interesting in the beginning, but mostly pretty unsympathetic. It's rather pleasing watching her comeuppance unfold. She kind of reminded me of Anna Percy from The A-List -- in fact, she could totally be her ancestor.

But honestly, these are minor complaints, because for the most part this was just scandal! Intrique! Romance! More intrique! It's over 400 pages long, and I still wanted more. I also really appreciated that it was a really good mix of resolution and unfinished business -- you could easily read this as a self-contained novel, and I don't feel like moving along in the series it will be like "wait, I have to try to remember EVERY detail about what happened in order to understand what's going on now" (this is how I sometimes feel about Private and Pretty Little Liars. I am going to try to pace myself before going on to the next two books, though I know I won't make it -- the third one is going to get read in hardcover, cost be damned.