One of the best books I’ve read in 2019, I absolutely was captivated by Alice’s story about her summer in New York for Helen Gurley Brown! With a blend of historical fiction built around historical fact, Renee Rosen crafted a compelling story that allowed me to not only fall in love with the fictional Alice, but also love Helen, a woman who changed the way young women were able to think about their own bodies, empowerment, and relationships. An incredible novel!

Friends and long-time readers will know I’m a big fan of Kate White, who happened to be the Editor-in-Chief of Cosmopolitan magazine only two years after Helen Gurley Brown left. I’ve always loved the way Cosmopolitan magazine promotes a new way of female empowerment—feminism that focuses on not only equality, but celebrating all of the wonderful things about being a female. When I went into this book, I thought it would be the story of Helen told through Alice’s eyes, but it wasn’t that at all!

In fact, the story of Alice completely captivated me. Alice is this amazing example of the type of reader that Helen’s vision of Cosmopolitan would not only reach out to—but change fundamentally. Alice is coming of age, in her early 20s and new to New York City. Alice struggles between being a “good girl” and finding out who she is and what she wants. Alice is the exact person to show readers about Helen’s girls (“my girls” as she calls them)—the ones who are young but empowered, who want careers, who want to be single but still have sex. This is the story of Helen’s girls told through Alice.

I absolutely adored Alice!!! She was this wonderful mix of inexperienced and savvy, navigating challenging situations based on her instincts, which over time she learns to trust to lead her the right way. I loved how everywhere Alice goes in the city, she thinks about her mother and what could have been. How did her glamorous, talented mother end up in the Midwest raising a family?

As Alice finds her way to working for Helen Gurley Brown on the re-imagined Cosmopolitan magazine, she learns who she is—a girl who is fiercely loyal, who wants to experience different men so she knows when she finds the right one for her, and who wants to be a photographer but is scared she isn’t talented enough. Alice and her Don Juan, as Helen calls him, was such a fun and relatable part of this book. Helen is right—we all have a Don Juan who we go back to even though we know he will leave us shattered.

This was such a unique way to celebrate Helen Gurley Brown’s life—through a fictional story about the exact sort of girl that Helen reached through her pioneering efforts at Cosmopolitan. I hope readers love this book as much as I did!

Thank you to Berkley for my copy. Opinions are my own.

Once in awhile you come across a premises that you just know you have to experience for yourself. You pick up a book and you just instantly connect. Not because of the characters or even the setting but just because it simply is written so well that you immediately get sucked into the very story itself and then before you know it, you are in love. In love with the characters, in love with the setting, in love with it all.

Park Avenue Summer is an exceptional read that not only took me by surprise but took my breath away. I absolutely devoured it and adored it and just couldn't get enough of it.
It is so well written, so well voiced and truly something I can't recommend enough. A wonderful insightful look into women in the work place in a time where we weren't quite accepted yet and had to fight for every little triumph and recognition we received.

I absolutely love everything that Renee Rosen writes! Park Avenue Summer has vivid characters and dynamic setting! New York! I listen to the superb performance on audio which I believe that the audio adds another dimension! I love the beautiful descriptive writing which draws me into time, place and culture.

Alice Weiss leaves her small town to pursue a career in photography in Manhattan in 1965. She asks her mother's friend for a favor and soon realizes photography in Manhattan is a lot more competitive than in her small town, but her mother's friends comes through for her and gets her a job as an assistant to Helen Gurley Brown, who has just taken over Cosmopolitan magazine after writing her famous book, Sex and the Single Girl. Alice is a fan and can not believe her luck! But not everyone is a fan of Ms. Brown and a lot of people refuse to work for her and try to sabotage her work. Alice tries to maintain her own dreams even as she is swept up in the glamorous world of the New York elite, but fortunately, she has Helen Gurley Brown as her mentor!

I loved this book and the glimpse into this part of the women's movement. In 2019, we still have a long way to go, but reading this and realizing how far we have come was definitely inspiring. It was interesting to see the perception of a strong women in 1965.

After growing up in the Midwest and listening to her mother’s stories about New York City, Alice Weiss heads to the big city to make a new life for herself. She longs to be a photographer, but things don’t quite work out that way. Instead, she’s an assistant to Helen Gurley Brown, the editor of Cosmopolitan Magazine. She had no idea that this would turn out to be an opportunity of a lifetime.

Although not totally giving up on her dreams of becoming a photographer, Alice throws herself into her job. Helen is not an easy person to work for and they are met with resistance from the magazine’s hierarchy at every turn, but neither woman ever gives up.

The 1960’s come alive in this book. The author does an excellent job of painting a very vivid picture of the era. I was completely transported to this time period and it brought back many memories. Renee Rosen even uses actual celebrity names throughout the book.

I do want to point out that the main character, Alice Weiss, is a fictional character. Helen Gurley Brown’s appearance is basically true-to-life. This book is a wonderful mix of fiction and real life brought together in a dramatic fashion.

This author grabbed my attention from page one and never let me go. I enjoyed this one until the last page was swiped. Larger than life characters with an exciting setting…I loved every minute of it.

Great historical fiction. I felt like I was really in 1960a NYC. Absolutely loved the fact that there were such strong female characters. Having previously worked in the business world i definitely remember the politics of it all and that came across strong in the writing as well. Just an overall strong and solid novel.

When I was a pre-teen and even into my early teen years I would go to the local library and, using ‘safe’ magazines like National Geographic as covers, slip issues of the completely unsafe and utterly wicked Cosmopolitan to a quiet spot where I could learn: 3 easy ways to make a man fall for me, why eyeliner is the difference between having a date Saturday night and staying home, and how short is too short for skirts in the workplace. All complemented by layouts of glossy, exotic women living a life I could only dream of at the time. My love for that magazine was so great that when I saw that Renee Rosen’s latest novel was about Helen Gurley Brown, Cosmo’s founder and editor for decades, I knew I would be reading Park Avenue Summer.

Alice Weiss wants to be a photographer, but it’s 1965, she’s in New York City, and she has no professional experience—just pretty photos she took at home in the Midwest. Desperate for a job she agrees to be the secretary for the new editor at Cosmopolitan, a traditional women’s magazine, ala Good Housekeeping. The Hearst Corporation has put a woman in charge in an effort to freshen up the magazine and, hopefully, save it. Except they weren’t counting on a woman like Helen Gurley Brown, who would want to change it. Who would toss out the tuna casserole recipes and replace them with articles about the new birth control pill. Who would dump advertisers like Pampers, Mr. Clean, and Swanson’s and pursue Maybelline, Clairol, and Chanel. The men in charge don’t like this at all and soon want her gone.

In Park Avenue Summer Rosen makes no attempt to paint Brown as some icon for the next generation of women. She was clearly a product of her times and those times required an acceptance of male attitudes towards working women and the mindset to work around them. Beat them at their own game as it were. She firmly believed in using feminine wiles to get your way. High heels, short skirts, pretending frailty or stupidity, seduction…whatever it took to get what you wanted. In some ways, she was incredibly liberated and in others, to today’s women, embarrassingly dated and superficial. Still, Rosen writes her as real and I appreciated it.

Park Avenue Summer is told from Alice’s point-of-view, giving the novel a clear-eyed perspective on all of Brown’s idiosyncratic behavior and her fierce determination to succeed, alongside Alice’s own drive to not only help her, but to forge her own path as a photographer. That, plus a Mad Men ‘60s sensibility throughout, makes for reading that is easy and satisfying. It may be a bit too soon for summer reading, but don’t let that stop you. Park Avenue Summer is buzzy and bright, an antidote to heavy, dark fiction. A great escape.

When Alice Weiss left her small town in Ohio for New York, she only had one aim: becoming a photographer. Yet, live wasn’t easy for an inexperienced young woman with high ambitions. A friend of her deceased mother arranged her an interview for the job of a secretary. Not exactly what Alice was looking for, but, well, she needed money and working for Helen Gurley Brown who had just taken over the Cosmo magazine seemed as good as any other job. What she didn’t expect was that her time as Helen’s right hand would bring her much more than just the money to survive: she learned to be ambitious, not to see marriage as the only goal for a woman and to stand up for herself. 1965 wasn’t quite ready for feminism and so wasn’t Alice. But things had to start finally.

Renée Rosen tells the story of Helen Gurley Brown who published the bestseller “Sex and the Single Girl” before becoming editor-in-chief of “Cosmopolitan” and transforming the magazine from a housewife read to the most widely sold independent women’s magazine. Talking openly about sex was simply scandalous in 1965 and showing sexy pictures of women was also new in the magazine world, but it was especially her attitude that made a big change. The character of Alice Weiss, the protagonist of the novel, is yet just an invention, but one I highly adored while reading.

Apart from all that is connected to Brown’s difficult start at the magazine, which I found quite interesting from today’s perspective, I liked Alice from the start. She is not the typical naive country girl coming to the big city. However, things are very different from what she was used to and she had to find her place in the Big Apple. Rosen portrays her in a very authentic way: she is sometimes insecure but ventures to overcome this and dares to speak for her own, she is working hard for her dream and does not give up even after horrendous experiences, she is at times torn between wanting to be independent and looking for a husband to marry. Also the way she describes New York of 1965 was wonderful, you are conquering the city together with Alice.

A brilliant behind-the-scenes novel which skilfully combines fact and fiction and offers a girl’s story without being a kitschy love story, quite the contrary: it shows our mothers in fighting for female independence.

Helen Gurley Brown is the author of the spirited novel, Sex and the Single Girl, and is the small-but-fierce feminist the big wigs at Hearst decide to hire as Editor-in-Chief when they want to revamp their magazine, Cosmopolitan.

It’s 1965 in New York; doctors are still refusing to prescribe single women the pill for fear of assisting to ‘ruin’ their lives, and it’s this breaking-of-the-1960s-housewife-mold that Alice dives head first into when she takes the job at Cosmo. She has just moved from the Midwest to the Big Apple to live out her dream of being a photographer. In the same spirit as The Devil Wears Prada, Ali has to take a position not as a photog, but as Brown’s assistant–to get her foot in the door of media publishing. While Brown is no Miranda Priestly, she has her own host of issues (crying spells being one of them), and Ali finds herself half the time in shock (tracking down back issues of Playboy is not what a nice girl should be doing) and half the time in awe (taking on a room full of potential marketing investors over lunch, anyone?) of her boss.

Fast-paced, fun, sexy, and passionate, Rosen writes a lively period piece just in time to be your next quick summer beach read. Fans of Lauren Weisberger, Sophie Kinsella, and Maria Semple will enjoy.

Historical fiction at its best!!! I loves learning about the history of.my favorite magazine. Strong characters, strong stories

Set in 1965, Park Avenue Summer is the story of Alice Weiss, a young girl from Ohio who follows her late mother’s dream to move to NYC and pursue a photography career. Alice gets a job as a secretary to Helen Gurley Brown, who has just accepted the editorial job at Cosmopolitan magazine. Alice grows in her job and learns what she wants and needs with advice and experiences from Helen and the men she meets during her time with Cosmo. When she is offered her dream job of a famous photographer’s assistant, can she leave Helen to spread her own wings?

I loved this book, so much that I read it in one sitting. The writing was fabulous, and I fell in love with the characters. The best thing an author can do, in my opinion, is take you to the place of the story without ever leaving your house. Ms. Rosen did that for me and NYC. I could picture the streets and the people and smell the perfumes, cigarette smoke and garbage. What a divine reading experience!

HOT DAMN this book was simply BRILLIANT!!!

Renée Rosen has written one heck of a book that is being immediately added to my favorites shelf! When I was a girl in my late teens and my 20s I never missed an issue of Cosmo it was hands-down my favorite magazine. This book not only tells the story of the reconstruction of Cosmopolitan magazine, but also of the start of the sexual revolution in the 60s. As a girl who grew up in the 80s it is hard to believe how far we came in 20 years, I don’t think anyone even batted an eyelash if I purchased a Cosmo in 1985? It is women like Helen Gurley Brown Who we have to thank for taking those first steps towards empowerment and liberation. And seriously what would we have done without those fabulous quizzes every month?

Alice has moved from Ohio to NYC with the dream of being a photographer. Soon enough she figures out it’s not going to be quite as easy as that, so with the help of a family friend she lands a job as a secretary. Not really what she wants to do, but she is excited that she will be working with and for, Helen Gurley Brown. Hgb who became infamous for writing the controversial book about sex and the single girl is now editor and chief of Cosmopolitan. Hgb has plans to turn the magazine world on its head, something she meets with much resistance. HGB will not be deterred though she is going to write a magazine for her girls; the single working girl who loves fashion, beauty, and *gasp* sex. The book is told from the perspective of Alice and through her eyes we get a front row look at the life of this dynamic woman and transitional time in history.

The story being told from Alice’s point of view I thought was extremely impactful. You really got to see how much Helen Gurley Brown cared for and wanted to mentor “her girls.“ Alice was a great character and I loved watching her navigate her way through her first real job and her first fling. Alice was smart and strong and I loved how she really knew what advice to take and what advice not to. Hgb’s message was so perfect. That as a woman it’s OK to have dreams and desires and to go after them, and probably even more important it’s OK to screw up. I also loved her theory about Don wands, because isn’t that the truth.

This book perfectly marries fact and fiction.Miss Rosen’s engaging writing style gave me such a well defined sense of place and time. I felt as though I was completely transported to 1960s NYC. I loved all the little attention to detail, the runs in the stockings, the jewelry, and the smoking, oh the smoking, so much smoking.

Simply put I was completely captivated by this enthralling story. I cannot recommend it enough!

*** many thanks to Berkley for my copy of this book ***

Park Avenue Summer was the perfect combo of great storytelling and an interesting subject matter. I was born in 1967, so Helen Gurley Brown was before my time, but Cosmopolitan magazine was not. In the late 70s and early 80s, Cosmo was an integral part of growing up.

Now that this book has opened my eyes to this petite, ballsy and bright woman who took over Cosmopolitan, I love this magazine ever more. She had scores of men, and even some women, who were against her vision and did their darnedest to undermine her. Her instincts were spot on and she stayed true to herself; that’s a role model. The entire time I was reading however, I just couldn’t get over how things have gone in circles as far as work place politics. Her sexual promiscuity and forthcoming banter regarding sex would have had her or anyone fired in our current work place climate.

I like that the author used a fictional personal assistant to tell Helen’s story, rather than write revisionist fiction. Rosen used this character’s point of view as our lens into the time, place and happenings of Helen Gurley Brown. She could instill facts into what Alice, the assistant, saw so that the reader really believed in the narrative.

This book reads quickly, especially for me, who knew so little about her and her successes. I immediately bought a used copy of Sex and the Single Girl when I finished the book. This is a great read to pick up this summer when you want a book that grabs you from start to finish. Kudos to the author for another readable, relatable and interesting story.

I enjoyed Park Avenue Summer and talked about it on Book Riot’s All the Books podcast for the release week. The discussion in that podcast can stand as my review.

Imagine a world when Cosmopolitan, the magazine, wasn’t a force in the magazine world… I can’t. Since I’ve been old enough to know what Cosmo is it has always been a go-to women’s magazine. From the sexy, eye-catching covers to the edgy titles on the cover Cosmo has always been a magazine that is on top of fashion and knowing what women want to read about. Helen Gurley Brown is the one who took Cosmo from a humdrum on the way out of business magazine to the one we all know and love now.

The story is told by Helen’s secretary, Alice. The secretary is the woman who has the inside scoop on the who’s who, who’s out, and who’s in, and who is doing what with who. Alice comes to New York to start a dream life. She dreams of being a photographer but instead becomes the secretary to a woman who is breaking down walls and showing the men in the magazine world what she is capable of.

I love the strength of the women in Park Avenue Summer. They show the men that they are capable of making a successful magazine. They prove that they can stand up for themselves and be successful in a world run by men. They have relationships that are what they want them to be, a marriage, a friendship, or just a convenience until the real thing comes along.

This is an amazing historical fiction book with a great look into life in New York during 1965.

Park Avenue Summer was a rare and insightful glimpse into the breath of life and style that new editor Helen Gurley Brown brought to the dying Cosmopolitan magazine. Openly featuring sexy models and discussing taboo topics were a shock to her predecessors and the boys club of Hearst. Told from the perspective of Alice Weiss a small town girl who found her way to NYC and is Helen’s personal assistant, Renee Rosen provides an eye opening tribute to Helen Gurley Brown and her struggle to save Cosmo and her fight for the right info and advertising for “her girls” in an openly chauvinist society. I highly enjoyed this story and would recommend it. I received an ARC of this book, all opinions are my own.

I used to be obsessed with Cosmo, I had a subscription for years and one of the best days every month was always when a copy showed up in my mailbox, so when I found out Park Avenue Summer focused on the woman who gave Cosmo a makeover in the sixties I was super excited about this one! NYC in this era is also fascinating for me, so I had a strong feeling that this would be an amazing read for me and it was!

I imagine it would be really tricky and somewhat complicated to blend fact with fiction but Rosen did an incredible job here. This is told solely from Alice’s perspective but you also learn so much about HGB through her eyes which was totally fascinating. Alice was well drawn, at the start she’s new to the city and trying to find her place there and she grows and matures so much throughout the book. HGB is quite a character, she’s endlessly interesting to me and after reading the authors note and seeing that much of what was portrayed was really true, I was even more impressed. Rosen’s attention to detail and obvious research is very apparent and impressive.

This one has it all my friends, rich historical detail, love, loss, family and maybe most importantly, it was inspiring. Both Alice and Helen were bold in their own way and ahead of their time despite the heavy pushback from the men in their lives and I so admired their sheer will and perseverance. Highly recommended by me, it’s a perfect summer read, light and fun but with depth and heart as well!

Park Avenue Summer in three words: Captivating, Vivid and Inspiring.

One of the very best books I have read this year. I discovered historical fiction through a friend and at first I thought I would not enjoy them. Not only do I enjoy them I love them. Renee Rosen is one of those historical fiction authors I have discovered and to me one of the best. Her research and attention to detail is on point. If you want a well written story about two strong women doing what needs to be done pick this up because you will not be disappointed. Happy reading!

4.5 stars—PARK AVENUE SUMMER by Renee Rosen is a stand alone story of women’s historical fiction focusing on a young woman in 1965 whose short lived career as the personal secretary to Helen Gurley Brown jumpstarts a life of love, loss, and professional success as a world renowned photographer.

Told from first person perspective (Alice) PARK AVENUE SUMMER follows twenty-one year old, single woman Alice Weiss as she ventures to New York City in 1965, to experience the life her late mother had always promised. With the help of her mother’s one time best friend Elaine Sloan, Alice will be hired as the personal secretary to Cosmopolitan’s new editor in Chief, Helen Gurley Brown, who along with Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem changed the world. As Helen struggles to keep Cosmo afloat, Alice battles the office gossip, lies, betrayal and manipulation, and her own heart breaking relationships.

PARK AVENUE SUMMER is an imaginative retelling that takes liberty with the events surrounding the first few months following Helen Gurley Brown’s entry into the world of magazine publishing. From boardroom squabbles to rampant employee departures, through the eyes of twenty-one year old Alice Weiss, we are witness to period in time that started the feminist revolution in North America. Our heroine’s venture into the world of publication is the stepping stone to a successful career as a photographer for Cosmo, as well as several popular women’s magazines. A fascinating and captivating piece of women’s (historical) fiction meant to entertain and intrigue.

Copy supplied by Netgalley

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When I read that this book was for fans of The Devil Wears Prada, I knew that I needed to read it immediately. I’m so glad that I got the chance to! The characters are all great, and I loved the behind the scenes stories about the magazine industry, Cosmopolitan in particular. I love the author’s writing style as well. I will read more of her books in the future.

I received an advanced reader copy of this book.