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📎Casual Reader's secondary Library Pick of February is The Princess of 72nd Street📎

📆: Thursday 19th February

📌: ON ROAD

this was recommended at our Borderline Fiction discussion at ON ROAD and it was already on my TBR so it feels right to run it up sooner rather than later.

judging a book by it’s cover ✅

new york city, upper west side, the 1970’s ✅

sounds like JUST our kind of book.

before you book a ticket, know that this is an intimate book club, it’s for our casual readers who really enjoy participating and have lots of things to say. looking forward to discussing with you all v.soon.

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about the book:

Ellen is a single artist living alone on New York’s Upper West Side in the 1970s. She is beset by old boyfriends, paint pigment choices, and, occasionally, by 'radiances' - episodes of joyous, reckless unreality. Under the influence of 'radiances' she becomes Princess Esmeralda, and West 72nd Street becomes the kingdom over which she rules. Life as Esmeralda is a liberating experience for Ellen, who, despite the chaos and stigma these episodes can bring, relishes the respite from the confines of the everyday. And yet those around her, particularly the men in her life, are threatened by her incarnation as Esmeralda, and by the freedom that it gives her.

The Princess of 72nd Street is Elaine Kraf's witty, dizzyingly inventive take on female liberation and mental health, a work of immense literary power and unbridled energy. Provocative at the time of its publication in 1979 and thoroughly iconoclastic, it is a remarkable portrait of an unforgettable woman.

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