The Luxe by Anna Godbersen

This book is 433 pages long and I'm about 100 pages in and I'm not going any further. It's a soap opera set amid high society teens in 1899 New York.

Penelope and Elizabeth are best friends because Penelope considers Elizabeth her greatest rival and must keep her close. Penelope plans to marry rich bad boy Henry because she wants "everyone to look at us and just dry up with envy that two people so superior in every respect have found each other." This sort of shallowness is a big tip-off for me; not my kind of book. And the other characters aren't much more interesting. Penelope has a male friend, Isaac, who is good at putting on a party. "He always knew where to get the freshest flowers" and "He knew how to shriek at the cooks so that the meats would come out just done enough." Allow me to roll my eyes here. Can professional cooks not do their work without teenaged supervision?

Elizabeth is in love with a stable boy, Will. (Will's eyes are a "bright, wounded blue" - what colour exactly? wounded blue?) Anyway, Elizabeth's maid, Lina, is also in love with Will. Speaking of shallow, Lina aspires to a time when her life will not be so simple and plain, a time when she will have the elaborate clothing and fine manners of her mistress.

But Elizabeth's family has lost their fortune and so she must obey orders to marry Henry, a match Henry's father has arranged to settle his son and keep him out of scandal. So Elizabeth fakes her death in order to wriggle out of her role in society. I'm not even curious enough about the outcome to skip to the end of this book. I'll just drop it in the library return bin.