Book #2: The Other Typist by Suzanne Rindell

I started this book yesterday (or the day before?) and had high enough hopes for it. It seemed like a very interesting, Great Gatsby-ish story. Rose Baker is a 1920s typist at a police precinct in New York City, and she's nothing that interesting--she's plain and efficient and poor and pretty boring. However, her life quickly gets more interesting after a new typist gets hired at the station, named Odalie Lazare, and Rose becomes enthralled with her. And by enthralled, I mean obsessed--she starts taking notes about Odalie's smallest movements and wants nothing more than to go out to lunch with her. And eventually, Odalie does decide to befriend her and even invites her to live with her at her luxurious hotel suite after a few weeks of friendship. Rose, who has always been such a rule-follower, starts to go off the path she's always trod as she follows Odalie into the world of speakeasies and riches. And she starts to see the world as a lot less black-and-white and a whole lot more gray. And by the end of the book, the reader sees things as a lot more gray because you have NO idea what the heck is going on! (More about that in a sec...)

One thing I really didn't like about this book was how much foreshadowing there was in it. It seemed like every other chapter, Rose (who is telling the story in hindsight) has to throw something in like "And if only I'd known how terribly things were going to work out for me in the end..." or "But that was before everything happened," etc. You can throw something like that in your book maybe ONCE but having that in REPEATEDLY really got annoying. In the same vein, I really didn't like how Rose seemed to go back to trying to convince her readers (us) over and over again of the same facts. It seemed like there were about five different times throughout the book when Rose tried to convince us that she was NOT actually obsessed with Odalie, that she really WAS pretty naive and prudish but not all THAT naive... it seemed like the author was using too many words to say things that should have just been understood through the story itself.

However, the characters themselves were very compelling and were the main reasons why I kept reading the book (because the first 2/3 of the book I really wasn't all that interested). Well, that, and because I saw on the back of the book it talked about how Rose was an "unreliable narrator" and I thought, "There has to be an interesting twist in here somewhere--I'll keep reading and hopefully it'll make all the rest of this much more compelling!" Unfortunately, the real "twist" comes in the last three sentences and it doesn't clear much stuff up at all. I was so confused by what I read at the end of the book that I went to read reviews on goodreads for some help and everyone else was just as confused as I was. You can take the story as it is at face value, or you might take the twist to mean that Odalie is a figment of Rose's imagination and she was lying to you about a lot of things and that she's bipolar or something, or some combination of the two? But it's COMPLETELY unclear and I think it would have been a WAYYY more interesting book if it turned out that Rose and Odalie were different personalities belonging to the same person, but it's just not at all obvious by how things turn out. I'm not sold on either interpretation and I am just bugged now because the twist accomplished nothing more than making me more confused. Ugh.