NY-centric novel to launch in Bay Ridge
Brooklyn BookBeat
In “Astor Place Vintage,” a novel by New York-based writer Stephanie Lehmann (Touchstone Books/Simon & Schuster), the past and present intertwine through the stories of two women—one longing to succeed in a rapidly modernizing world and the other clinging tightly to yesterday. Lehmann celebrate the release of her novel – which has received rave reviews from esteemed writers and critics – in Brooklyn on June 27, with a reading and signing at Bay Ridge’s BookMarke Shoppe.
When Astor Place Vintage shop owner Amanda Rosenbloom visits the Manhattan apartment of aging socialite Jane Kelly, she thinks she is on just another call to appraise and purchase clothing from a wealthy, elderly woman. Yet after discovering a century-old journal concealed in the lining of a fur muff, Amanda is irresistibly drawn into the life and times of Olive Wescott, a young woman who moved to New York with her father in 1907.
Twenty-year-old Olive lives at a time when Victorian ideals that limited a woman’s sphere to marriage and motherhood are just beginning to give way. She has ambitions to become a department store buyer, but when her father dies, Olive is left on the brink of poverty and must take a low-paying job as salesgirl at the Siegel-Cooper Department Store. (The building still stands today as Bed, Bath & Beyond on 18th Street & 6th Avenue.) Olive is determined to survive, and even thrive, in her drastically reduced circumstances.