Play Book Tag discussion

The real protagonist of this story set in 2 different time periods is The Dakota, the iconic cooperative apartment house on Central Park West in NYC. We see it as a daring experiment rising in the middle of farmlands and shanties in the 1880s, a gothic bavarian architectural phenomenon that both epitomized the excesses of The Gilded Age and proposed a daring new conept of living for the well-to-do with social aspirations. We also see it a hundred years later: dirty facade, a tourist destination for the site of John Lennon's murder, with its apartments being stripped of the original mahogony and brass for bamboo dividers, sponge applied paint textures, lucite, steel and faux marble by the new generation of wealthy. There is no single apartment building anywhere with the mystique of The Dakota.

The storylines: Sara Smythe is given the opportunity to leave London for NYC and a job managing the brand new Dakota. It's Gilded Age NY and opportunity and an impossible love beckon for the bastard daughter of an Earl. Bailey Camden is an interior designer that has just been released from a stint in rehab. Fragile, struggling with alcoholism, jobless and homeless, Bailey gratefully grabs the job offered by her Camden 'cousin' to oversee the tasteless renovation of the Camden apartment at the Dakota. Bailey is descended from a ward of the first Camden to live in the Dakota thus not a real cousin. But still she feels a deep affinity to the Dakota and when some surprising information surfaces, Bailey sees a chance to find a place in a lineage, a history, even if it is one tied to murder and insanity, and start building a new life for herself.

Davis' writing strength is in making a NYC landmark a critical component of her novels, weaving strands of the history of a building and NYC itself into her stories. She writes a good story, and connects the modern and historic stories quite well. However, there's something that isn't quite developed sufficiently here or even particularly original. I didn't really care because reading about The Dakota and NYC was pure heaven.