Peggy had been enjoying her volunteer job at a Manhattan bookstore where she met intriguing people who furthered her interests in the arts, social welfare, and politics, but her widowed mother and uncles, who controlled the family money, put a hold on the relative freedom she'd tasted, in order to secure her younger sister's engagement to a man who would expand her family's influence and their holdings in the mining industry out west. As she was still a minor, and had yet to come into any of her inheritance, and because, as a woman, she had no property or other rights, she was compelled to obey her uncles as well as please her mother, who followed strict codes of behavior, dress, and even food and drink choices. Though the Batternbergs were Jewish, they had long left behind such traditions as kosher dining – their food restrictions were more about shunning the tastes of the less well off for such items as Coney Island sausages, which would eventually be known as hot dogs, and the new drink, Coca Cola.
Still, once at the hotel Peggy found opportunities for rebellion: bicycling with her brother as her only chaperone, doctoring her restrictive swimming costume to remove the sleeves and under layers, and eventually making her way to Coney Island, where she is determined to find new adventures, but ends up involved in far more scandalous and sinister activities than she bargained for...but also falls in love with both modern art and and a pioneering artist.
This carefully researched and richly detailed mystery novel is a compelling read, especially for those who are interested in New York and Brooklyn history, the art world as it edges toward modernism, and the societal changes in both Europe and the United States in an age of mass immigration and the sweeping technical and scientific developments in the period preceding World War I.
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