EMPIRE GIRLS

When their father dies unexpectedly and leaves their home to a half brother they never knew they had, Ivy and Rose Adams head to Jazz-Age New York City to find their missing sibling, each full of expectations and unprepared for the changes the city will wreak.

Neither plain, practical Rose nor beautiful, dreamy Ivy are prepared for the sudden death of their father. Devastated by grief, they are further rocked when they learn he was on the brink of financial disaster and that he left the management of his home and estate—such as it is—to Asher, a son from a previous marriage. More mysterious, Asher seems to have disappeared since he returned from the Great War. Ivy and Rose take it upon themselves to find him: Rose, because she wants to convince him to sign their home over to them, and Ivy, because she feels her brother will somehow take the place of the father she was so close to. But following the few clues their father left takes the girls down paths they never expected; it makes them question their roles in the family and their own personalities as they've always understood them, causing enormous friction between them before allowing them to move beyond their preconceived notions of who they are and who they might become. Hayes and Nyhan have written an imaginative and elegant tribute to the timeless complications of young women coming of age, set against the glitter and jumble of New York in the 1920s. Family tensions are ratcheted up through death, misunderstanding, jealousy and the shadow of war, and the sisters find that once they leave the comfort of their father’s love and their childhood home, they are both challenged and liberated.

Lovely and lyrical.