#CBR12 Bingo: The Roaring 20s (could easily be used for Violet as well)17-year-old Evangeline “Evie” O’Neill can sense people’s secrets if she holds a personal object belonging to them and concentrates hard on it. She becomes decidedly unpopular in her home town when she gets drunk at a party and reveals that one of the town’s golden boys knocked up a hotel maid and paid her to have the problem “dealt with”. He accuses her of slander and threatens to sue her family. Evie can’t very well reveal how she knows the details of the story and isn’t exactly unhappy when her parents send her to stay with her bachelor uncle in New York City anyway. Evie dreams of going to parties, seeing shows, and gossipping with her best friend Mabel, daughter of radical socialists, who live in the same building as Evie’s uncle Will.
Before Evie even makes it to the museum that her uncle Will runs, she’s been kissed and pick-pocketed by the roguish Sam Lloyd at Grand Central Station. At the museum, she’s introduced to Jericho Jones, the tall and deadly serious young man that her uncle has taken under his wing (and who Mabel has a massive crush on). While Jericho seems just as scholarly and stick-in-the-mud as Evie’s uncle, he has secrets of his own. Mabel and Evie also befriend Theta Knight, a glamorous Ziegfeld girl, and her “brother” Henry, a talented piano player who live in the same building as them. Important to the story is also Memphis Campbell, who used to have the gift of healing, until his mother was dying.
All of these young people from different social backgrounds and locations in the US meet up over the course of the story, as a comet is about to travel over New York City and a series of gruesome murders with occult connections catch the attention of reporters. The police ask Evie’s uncle Will to consult, but it’s not until Evie’s party lifestyle threatens to have her sent back home that she reveals her psychic powers and how she’s able to read objects at the murder scenes (and feel a connection to the creepy murderer).
Full review on my blog.
Bingo #12: Red (House of Earth and Blood), Reader’s Choice (Boyfriend Material), UnCannon (Bitterblue), The Roaring 20s (this) , Music (Born to Run)
Bingo#13: The Roaring 20s (this), Pandemic (Beach Read), Friendship (My Favorite Half-Night Stand), Green (Emerald Blaze), I Wish… (The House in the Cerulean Sea)
Bingo card completed!