Renée Rosen (1)

Park Avenue Summer is a read that is pure fun. Never too heavy, and just shocking enough to grip my interest. It combines real history (the making of the first issue of Cosmopolitan under Helen Gurley Brown’s editorship) with the story of a young woman finding her feet in New York. It’s a coming of age story of a magazine and a young woman.

Alice Weiss has left her hometown after her father has remarried and she’s been jilted by her fiancé. She’s moved to New York to try to become a photographer and in a way, feel closer to her dead mother who loved the city. She finds a job at Cosmopolitan magazine, which is undergoing some major changes under its first female editor, Helen Gurley Brown. It’s a big challenge, with old staff resigning left and right and budgets shrinking. Helen Gurley Brown is determined to make a magazine for the modern young woman after the success of her book, Sex and the Single Girl, but she faces a lot of roadblocks as the publishing company is aghast at some of her decisions. Alice is there to see it all, and gets entangled with her own Don Juan – Erik, who works for the (all male) upper management. It’s dramatic and full on, but Alice also finds time to work on her photography skills with Christopher, an up and coming photographer. As the pages of the new Cosmo grow, so does Alice, finding out some important things about her family and who she is.

The premise of the story is simple, but it’s very absorbing and engaging. Perhaps it’s because of the demonstratable rising of female control over a magazine that is for women or due to the nostalgia of 1960s New York City. (Alice lives in her own apartment on a secretary’s wage, and her dinner is often less than a dollar – can anyone do that these days?). It has a bit of the Mad Men mystique to it, but it’s much more female dominated (although the plumes of smoke and ashtrays are still ubiquitous). Sometimes the story is more about the magazine, but towards the end it gravitates much more to Alice and her life. It’s a nice segue after the tumultuous ride to the first issue of the magazine, but it’s not smooth sailing for Alice.

The writing flows freely and the story is easy to read and follow. It doesn’t pretend to be anything it’s not – no mysterious symbolism or covert themes – it’s just pure fun. It’s well researched and the characters are clearly defined. At times it ran high with emotion and drama but the stakes never seemed too high to overcome. A definite escape or beach read that won’t disappoint.

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