I came across this article via Vogue.com and immediately thought "I must send this to my girls" and while I was at it I figured I would share it here too. I am excited to dive into some of these reads!
Vogue’s Spring Books Guide: Bad Girls Reign Supreme
Once upon a time, in fiction—as in life—women had to behave themselves in order to be “likable.” This spring’s standout debut novels celebrate lost girls in the big city—young, adrift, and ready to do anything to make their mark.
“She knew if she waited long enough it would happen. The big bang, the cosmic crash, the delightful disturbance that would determine her true city fate,” thinks Lucy, the Idaho naïf turned art world muse in Molly Prentiss’s love letter to a vanished New York, Tuesday Nights in 1980 (Scout).
Innocence can be a kind of currency, one easily stolen—or so finds the young Midwestern waitress in Stephanie Danler’s Sweetbitter (Knopf), whose tutelage by a jaded older couple gives way to Dangerous Liaisons–style lessons in oysters and betrayal. Danler, who met her editor while waitressing at Buvette, nails the raucous mise-en-scène of a New York restaurant and the way in which one’s coworkers can become a kind of substitute family.
Don’t quit your day job: That’s the takeaway of Lisa Owens’s ruefully funny, London-set Not Working (Dial), which features a kind of millennial Bridget Jones whose red wine–and–TED Talk–fueled pursuit of a higher purpose in life leads to hard truths and hangovers.
A trip to Sri Lanka provides no easy redemption for the wayward heroine of Hannah Tennant-Moore’s Wreck and Order (Hogarth), who speaks to 20-something motivations—“lust, rage, lust, rage”—with outspoken feminism and rueful honesty: “I felt I could handle the wrong choices now, that I could live the old life in a new way.”
And the most unrepentant of all is the London auction house assistant in L. S. Hilton’s jubilantly mordant Maestra (Putnam), who uncovers a conspiracy, dons an Eres bikini, and reveals a killer instinct for Baroque painting. Already optioned for the big screen by Amy Pascal, it’s the story of a 21st-century femme fatale as devious as Tom Ripley—and as seductive as Bacall.
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