The Lions of Fifth Avenue

Can you imagine anything better than living in an apartment nestled under the staircases of the flagship New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue? Not if you're a librarian or book lover you can't! It seems that the author, Fiona Davis, has a penchant for writing novels that plum the historical depths of various iconoclastic New York City locations, including the famed Chelsea Hotel, The Dakota, home of John and Yoko, and even Grand Central Station. http://www.fionadavis.net/


This time she has combined a mystery about stolen or missing first editions with the story of the burgeoning women's movement beginning back in 1913 and

spanning three generations. Though highly improbable, "The Lions of Fifth Avenue," is great fun.


Jack Lyons is the superintendent of operations at the library, basically a Jack of all trades if you don't mind my pun. He spends his evenings holed up in his office struggling to write the great American novel. It falls to his wife Laura to handle the kids, Harry and Pearl, the shopping, cleaning, cooking, and all the mundane little things that make up the life of a homemaker. But she is  chomping at the bit for a challenge, to be financially independent and to use her Vassar degree. When she learns that the Columbia School of Journalism is admitting its first classes of women Laura dreams of the impossible and makes it happen.


In 1993 we meet Sadie Donovan, Laura Lyons' granddaughter, and an impassioned librarian who has just been promoted to curator of the Berg Collection at the very same library where her grandmother once lived and left under a cloud of suspicion and scandal. It seems that several rare books had disappeared under Jack's care. Now, just as Sadie is about to prove herself at her dream job, priceless manuscripts once again go missing. To make matters worse, she has kept her relationship to the Lyons family a secret from the library board and its director.


Davis creates a complex mystery angle that involves the original architecture of the library and a sparkling love interest between Sadie and the private investigator hired to uncover the thief. But it is Laura's story that is the more compelling as Davis  illustrates the severe restrictions that women in the early twentieth century faced while attempting to carve out a niche for themselves other than wife and mother.


A graduate of Columbia Journalism school herself, Davis is especially good at taking us inside the once all male institution and showing us the disdain the professors held for their female students, assigning them puff pieces on clothing or a day in the life of the mayor's wife. She incorporates the historical Heterodoxy Club, an early feminist organization formed to give women a place to use their voices to focus on individual freedom. As Laura becomes more involved with the club and its members we see her life expand in ways she couldn't have predicted. But of course, the joy of selfhood will be mitigated by unintended consequences that will be difficult for her to live with.


Chosen for the Good Morning America book club, "The Lions of Fifth Avenue," while not a work of sublime literature, is a rip-roaring good story that you'll sit down to on a rainy afternoon and finish long after dark as you wonder where the day went. Writers. How do they do it?