genre: young adult historical fiction
Wicked intelligent and witty to a fault, Beatrice arrives at Hey Nonny Nonny as an orphan, hopeful that the boarding house owned by her Uncle Leo and cousin Hero might become a home. It doesn’t take long before she learns that more than a boarding house, Hey Nonny Nonny is a speakeasy on the verge of financial collapse, what with accessing bootlegged liquor being challenging to acquire. But Leo and Hero, with their friends Benedict, Prince and Maggie, do the best they can to get by - with all kinds of drama in the meantime, especially between Beatrice and Benedict whose verbal warfare insures they could never love each other. Right?
I LOVE THIS BOOK. Oh my GOODNESS, as a fervent fan of Much Ado About Nothing, I slurped it up in a fervor. The tone is exactly right - the banter between Beatrice and Benedict is sharp and delightful and the internal dialogues are just as fabulous. Every once and a while I had a hard time keeping some of the bootlegging/mobster storyline straight but I think that’s partly because I was reading so fast to get to the end. I still got the gist and it in no way diminishes my feelings for this book. I loved the reinterpretation during the roaring twenties - jazz and women’s rights and Prohibition, and so stinking romantic in all the right ways. Shakespeare would not be disappointed, I think.
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