Relative Fortunes by Marlowe Benn

Very much a story of two halves this one.  One half was engrossing and atmospheric and the other was disjointed and felt very thrown together and almost bolted on to the tale. 

First off, the good bit.  Julia's life has been rather charmed, admittedly she has lost both her father and her mother but she has enough wealth to live her own life and is even dabbling in her own printing imprint - Capriole is very much a dabble at this point in time, no matter what Julia seems to think.  As her 25th Birthday approaches she has to return to the States as her half-brother is disputing that she is entitled to the money left her under her father's will and she desperately needs to salvage her route to independence.  Julia is fiercely independant but doesn't really see herself as that, she just sees herself as a modern woman living life on her terms.  This is related so matter of factly that it does feel natural and sets the character well on the page.

The backdrop for the story is Prohibition New York, but it is in the world of privilege so there is plenty of alcohol flowing.  Again, this is seen as being part of the natural order of things - if you have wealth you can have whatever you want and the law can be safely ignored.  Private clubs and homes serve liquor with impunity and nary a whiff of the police raiding them.  It is also very noticeable that the lives of wealthy women seem to just centre around which party or club they can visit that night and days are spent more or less idle.  The descriptions of the locales and the clothing are brief but really place the reader in the setting.

Julia herself is feisty and sarcastic.  She is clearly an intelligent woman and this does come across well on the page and her aversion to be shackled to a man (as she sees marriage) seems perfectly natural.  I liked that although she sees the need for Equality For Women she is not politically active or motivated to be so, makes a nice change for female protagonists in books set in this era.  As she spends more time with the Rankins and the Winterjays she does become more politically aware but still seems pretty laissez faire about it all, preferring to concentrate on saving her fortune by any means necessary.

The rest of the cast, and this is a large cast, are okay.  Most of them are pretty much two dimensional shades of a particular type.  Glennis is the flighty, society girl; happy enough to shock but all she wants is a husband.  Phillip is a playboy type, only really interested in accumulating and creating art with a nice line in dissolution on the side.  We never really get to know too much about the others, even Jack, Alice and the ill-fated Naomi.

The "bad" bit is really the mystery of Naomi's death.  It just feels uncomfortable on the page and by Glennis convincing Julia that something is wrong with the circumstances the resulting investigation and suppositions really don't fit with the rest of the fictional world.  It honestly felt bolted in to the story to add a bit of excitement, when there were so many ways this could have been added (should the author desire) without making the story feel like two separate stories.  Honestly, for me it was clunky and just didn't work.