The Lions of Fifth Avenue

The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis

Read April 2024

The Lions of Fifth Avenue

I listened to this as an audiobook while working on puzzles.  It was a good book to listen to as it went quickly and the narrator was good.  I started out really enjoying the story - a typical dual timeline story between 1993 and 1913.  The two women who are front and center to the story are Laura Lyons, who is married to the superintendent of the New York Public Library so lives on site with her husband and two small children, and Sadie Donovan who is the curator at the New York Public Library eighty years later - and also the granddaughter of Laura Lyons.  A series of thefts from the library cause Sadie to begin digging into her own family's past, and learning more about her mysterious grandmother in the process.

I don’t mind back and forth timelines in stories - in fact, I rather enjoy them.  I felt invested in Laura’s story rather quickly and grew to like Sadie more and more.  Both are strong women who push at boundaries that are thrust on them.  Laura’s glimpse of what a woman ‘could do’ and her determination to push through those limitations and boundaries that she encountered simply because of her gender made for interesting reading.  In the end, though, I think maybe I grew a bit bored with the story?  I enjoyed it, and finished it, but it wasn’t a favorite read as I had initially thought it might be.  I would rate it a 3.5 to 4.

The Lions of Fifth Avenue by Fiona Davis

Read April 2024