Name: The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis
Item: The Lions of Fifth Avenue
Author: Trenzle Review

The Lions of Fifth Avenue DEALS

Amazon
$4.91 VIEW

In 1913, Laura Lyons is a stay-at-home mother who shares an apartment with her family in the New York Public Library, where her husband serves as the director. As a student at Columbia Journalism School, she discovers a new world outside the confines of the library where women can have their own identities. She is forced to make a decision when someone starts stealing priceless books and her way of life is threatened.

Sadie, Laura’s granddaughter, gets employed as a curator at the New York Public Library 80 years later. Sadie begins looking into the past when rare books from an exhibit she is setting up start to disappear, and she might not like what she discovers.

My blog’s readers are aware of my passion for historical fiction. As soon as I started reading the books, I fully anticipated fangirling in this review. The mystery, several timelines, and connection to the New York Public Library all make it sound intriguing. This book’s pages are not the fascinating piece of paper.

Not the worst book I’ve ever read is The Lions of Fifth Avenue. It came off as the author being indulgent. Davis intended the location and period to be connected, but the plot and the characters never quite appeared to gel. Since I have only read this one book by Fiona Davis, the rest of her works may be equally as excellent. Will I probably find out? No.

The Lions of Fifth Avenue has a very interesting premise in that the story follows two women of the same family in different time periods. Laura’s characterisation and mental patterns resemble those of a March sister from Little Women. She is a woman who is both hesitant and feels as like she is on the verge of something spectacular. She has a natural ambition but is living the personal and professional life that people expected her to live.

After becoming a mother, Laura is beginning to widen her horizons, something that women of her era would not have done without taking significant risks. Her granddaughter Sadie might be too self-assured. The plotline needed a lot of suspension of disbelief, which I simply wasn’t capable of while reading.

The Lions of Fifth Avenue is actually two books in one, and both of them start out incredibly slowly. There is so much information offered that doesn’t actually matter in the context of the story that, instead of advancing the plot, the overuse drags it down. I did enjoy the historical details.

I took a little online dive into the Berg Collection at the New York Public Library. The title relates to the Lions on the steps of the New York Public Library, who in many ways is the book’s most interesting character, and you may be wondering why Lions is written as it is in the title since the character’s last name is “Lyons.”

If you plan to read The Lions of Fifth Avenue, I won’t give away any major plot points. I’ll admit that a lot of the content feels like filler. threads that are pointless. A relationship in the previous plot line has the potential to be pretty interesting, but it comes out as forced and like it was inserted after the fact. The conclusion feels hasty and poorly thought out, and it is incredibly handy. The Lions of Fifth Avenue would have been a far more enjoyable read if the filler had been concentrated on the developing elements.

About The Book

It’s 1913, and on the surface, Laura Lyons couldn’t ask for more out of life—her husband is the superintendent of the New York Public Library, allowing their family to live in an apartment within the grand building, and they are blessed with two children. But headstrong, passionate Laura wants more, and when she takes a leap of faith and applies to the Columbia Journalism School, her world is cracked wide open.

As her studies take her all over the city, she is drawn to Greenwich Village’s new bohemia, where she discovers the Heterodoxy Club—a radical, all-female group in which women are encouraged to loudly share their opinions on suffrage, birth control, and women’s rights. Soon, Laura finds herself questioning her traditional role as wife and mother. And when valuable books are stolen back at the library, threatening the home and institution she loves, she’s forced to confront her shifting priorities head on . . . and may just lose everything in the process.

Eighty years later, in 1993, Sadie Donovan struggles with the legacy of her grandmother, the famous essayist Laura Lyons, especially after she’s wrangled her dream job as a curator at the New York Public Library. But the job quickly becomes a nightmare when rare manuscripts, notes, and books for the exhibit Sadie’s running begin disappearing from the library’s famous Berg Collection.

Determined to save both the exhibit and her career, the typically risk-averse Sadie teams up with a private security expert to uncover the culprit. However, things unexpectedly become personal when the investigation leads Sadie to some unwelcome truths about her own family heritage—truths that shed new light on the biggest tragedy in the library’s history.

The Review