The 1920s aren’t really my decade. I mean, they are, in the sense that I went through a period in my life where I was OBSESSED with Prohibition and the Mafia, and that lead me to the things I’ve spent most of my adult life studying, but the social history of the 1920s is not really something I’ve spent a lot of time with. Oh sure, I’ve watched Miss Fisher and I’m an avid (not ironic) Downton Abbey watcher, but it’s not a period I know well.

I know that Lauren Willig says some of the same things- she said in her podcast with Sarah a few weeks ago that she had said she would never write in the 20th century, because the history is so horrible (what with the two world wars) and that the road to books is paved with writers saying, “I’m not gonna write that.”

I’m super glad she did.

The Other Sister is about Rachel Woodley, who discovers after her mother’s death that she’s not the orphan she thought she was. Her father is not dead, but an Earl with a whole other family, while she was raised in genteel poverty with her mother claiming to be a widow. It’s all very awkward. Rachel goes to London, and falls in with Simon, a gossip columnist, and her helps her concoct an identity to infiltrate the Bright Young Things of London society so she can figure out who she is.

What I’ve realized through watching Miss Fisher, and what this book reveals really well, is that the 1920s were a long, prolonged, PTSD episode for the world. Go fast, party hard, live it up, fuck the rules, because why does it matter? Everything has gone to shit. It will probably go to shit again. Even though Rachel, and the other Bright Young Things weren’t old enough to be fighting  in the war, they were coming of age during it, and they understand how hellish it was. They see how their elders (whether its their fathers, brothers, or friends) came back changed, and no one is talking about it. Even though the adult generation doesn’t think they get it (like all older generations look down on the ones that come after them), they do understand how the world has fundamentally changed, and it did affect them as profoundly as it did the fighting generation.

“They say we were too young to understand what they went through in the trenches. But we have seen the cost of it, the toll in life and health, in industry and ambition.”

We all self-medicate in different ways.

So there’s that theme- the war is only briefly mentioned by anyone (until Simon does talk about it), but it’s that shadow that follows everyone. Some are running from it, some are running because everyone else is running, but how many young people today have we seen who have come of age under the specter of terrorism and war and have adopted a persona that says “Fuck it all?” This is human nature.

The other thing that Willig addresses is parental abandonment. Rachel suddenly has to cope with this father who didn’t die like she’d been told, and the news that she’s an earl’s by-blow, and so she comes up with a half-baked plan to worm her way into his world for…what? Even she’s not sure what her endgame is. It just seemed like a good idea at the time. She’s so angry that her world turned upside down twice in as many days, she wants to do SOMETHING. She’s about 24 or so, so that’s the right age to have righteous anger without a goal.

Simon is really interesting. He’s a gossip columnist but also part of the BYT social circle, so he he can be all “Oh, no, I’m totally not here for this ridiculous partying, I’M HERE FOR WORK.” (“Oh, no, I have to read this romance novel FOR WORK. Woe woe woe Sarah is such a demanding boss oh nooooo.”) He’s got his reasons for helping Rachel enter into society, he’s got his reasons for his life, but he works so hard at being above it all that you know he’s not.

The romance…. it was just sort of there? It wasn’t really the focus, and I like Rachel and Simon, and I like them together. I think the strength of the book is in it’s depiction of the time and place and in Rachel’s identity struggle.  The romance was used as the method to resolve things, not the focus of the story itself. That’s fine, that didn’t take away from my enjoyment at all. Knowing that Willig was considering a love triangle until she got words on the page and went “nope that’s not happening” …I don’t think that would have worked well at all.

I like Willig’s writing a lot.  It’s not complex; it’s kind of like the hot chocolate of prose. It’s smooth, and it’s classic. That may sound kind of like damning with faint praise, which I’m really not trying to do. There are times when what I want is smooth prose without a lot of flourishes, and Willig always delivers.

If you want to get a sense of the post-war, ridiculous frenzy, and the changing roles of people in society when the world went very literally to shit, this is for you. Parental abandonment? That might be a bit more difficult.