I loved The Comeback SO much but might have to resign myself to the fact that Ella Berman's books are not for me. I had some of the same issues with When We Were Innocent that I had with this title: a slow and meandering pace and a plot with no forward momentum.

LA Women is a dual timeline story set in 1960s and ’70s Los Angeles. In the 1970s, Lane, a writer, looks back on her complicated friendship with Gala, an It Girl who seems to be missing.

I was hoping for Daisy Jones vibes, but between the shifting timeline and the very slowly revealed relationship between these women, I struggled to connect with both of them and feel invested in their story. I'm giving it 3.5 stars for the overall experience but rounding up for the setting!

Two women living in 60's and 70's Los Angeles compete for writing success in this ode to friendship, and southern california, in all it's gritty excess. It's a magnetic dual‑timeline story of ambition, friendship, rivalry, and creative betrayal.

In the 60s, Gala and Lane were friends, not best friends, but casual aquaintences, who respected each others' work. When Gala's star soon starts to shine more brightly than Lane's, she becomes jealous, and decides to write a no holes barred, tell all book about their relationship, and what really happened during those late night Laurel Canyon drug infused parties. Soon after her book is published, Gala disappears.

I loved the descriptions of LA in the 60s and 70s, the smog, the drugs, the dirty underbelly of the entertainment industry. It's a character unto itself and provides a great background for the women's friendship and desire for something more.

The author explores the ethics of writing about real people, and raises questions about appropriation, loyalty, and where truth ends and fiction begins.

She also talks about the toll that female ambition and rivalry takes, especially for women navigating a male-dominated sphere, balancing creativity, friendship, and motherhood.

The 2 main characters were not that likeable, and the book does have some pacing issues, but it was a good delve into relationships, ambition, and the free wheeling vibe of the times.

This book was about two writers who were supposed to be friends but were more like frenemies. I think if this book wasn’t so long it may have been better. I kept waiting for something big to happen and it just didn’t.
Thank you to Netgalley and to the publishers for allowing me to read this advanced copy.

L.A. Women is a great example on how society causes women to constantly compare themselves to one another. Lane and Gala clearly have a lot of love for one another but their insecurities caused a riff in their relationship. If we’re being honest here, the relationship between Lane and Gala was the most real relationship in the entire book. The rest of the relationships are purely based on status and comfort.

You have Charlie, a closeted gay man who abandons Lane at her most vulnerable. He knows she has had a rough childhood with her own mother and leaves her in the dust after the birth of her twins. Once she was no longer the fun Lane who could host parties and get drunk with him, he left.

Scotty really only wants Lane up until she gives birth to his kids and then he also lets her down. She told him she was scared to have kids but because he desperately wanted to be a father, he pushed for this family. Once Lane started experiencing some postpartum issues, he immediately loses all faith in her when she needed him most.

While Lane and Gala get mad at one another pretty frequently, they’re the only people being honest with one another even at the expense of their friendship.

I honestly didnt like any of the characters and found this hard to get through. The mystery wasn’t really a mystery. I was pretty let down by the reveal of where Gala is.

Thank you to Berkley for the ARC.

This is a perfect example of being able to skim a book and still capture everything the author is writing.

The premise of this is interesting, full of toxic female friendships, LA culture in the 60s/70s, and the inability to really ever trust anyone completely. But the author makes the reading experience feel excruciating due to the unnecessary long page length, unemotional inner monologue, and meaningless acadios, actions and words that add nothing to the story. The “then” timeline could easily provide more depth into the characters, but it got repetitive really quickly. It’s definitely a character driven story more than anything else, which could be fine for me if the characters offer any emotional connection for themselves and allow me, as the reader, to sympathize. Yet I found myself uncaring and uninterested in anything and everything both had to say and offer.

I really liked the historical context in the story, the attention to LA and its culture doing these times, and it felt like the historical accuracy was relevant to the story as well and not just added for the sake of it. There were definitely more than a few times where it feels vividly intimate and it’s easy to get lost in the authors words related to the city.

Overall though, the story was boring, repetitive and overly long. Had it been less pages of the characters (mostly Lane) doing nothing and more pressure into finding out what happened to Gala or such, then I would’ve been more entertained.

This book didn’t quite work for me. I struggled to get into it and nearly stopped reading around the 35% mark. I decided to push through, but the story never fully pulled me in."

This book dares you to ask: when we tell the truth, whose story do we steal? Especially as it explores the dangerous magic of making art out of people you love and the irreversible price of exposure.

a semi-interesting story told at a very slow pace. there are parts of this that sing, but others that seem to drag on and on. you're never quite sure what the deal between lane and gala is, which is the point, but it often feels repetitive.

L.A. Women by Ella Berman is Berman's latest novel looking at fraught female friendships, this time between newcomer Lane Warren and LA native Gala Margolis, two very different writers who become friends after meeting at parties. Their relationship continues, changing form, over a decade, the book jumping from the inciting incident, when Gala has disappeared, to tracing the previous years. Lane and Gala's story is driven by artistic connection, ambition, competition, and betrayal, as well as the mystery lingering over the book.

Berman has a native Angeleno's eye for the city and a good handle on the insider, juicy elements of Hollywood. She does a great job putting you in the darkly glamorous Los Angeles of the 60s and 70s, specifically the creative haven of Laurel Canyon at its peak - specifically inspired by Joan Didion and Eve Babitz. The book ran longer than necessary at 400+ pages and could have been a bit tighter, but the characters and their world are intriguing.

2 stars Thanks to BookBrowse and Berkley for providing this ARC. Publishes August 5, 2025

I liked the premise of this book when I first read it. However I felt that it never really lived up to the hype.

Two very different female authors become friends - or do they? One is quiet and self loathing while the other is loud boisterous and unapologetic. Over time they have a falling out and the loud author goes missing.

This is a long book that, for me, never really hit the mark. There was enough to the story that you kept turning pages, hoping for a twist or a turn somewhere along the line, but that never really came. I believe that I would have been happier had the book only been around 250 pages. Waiting 400 pages for something to happen, that never does, takes a lot away from a book.

L.A. Women is a snapshot of Hollywood at its peak glamour in the 60s and 70s, and a character study of two women, each toxic and broken in their own ways; it is the story of how their lives intertwine and, ultimately, how their friendship brings out the worst in themselves and damages each other and themselves.

This is a slow moving, very internalized, character-driven story. If you aren't a fan of those - this isn't for you.

I did find the characters to be intriguing up front, but the more I read, the less I cared about them.

Lane in particular I just hated (she is who I fear people think I am) and had a hard time sympathizing with. Gala was so intriguing (we all know someone like her - bigger than life and just a little bit frightening because you never know what they'll say or do next); but I just found myself wanting more from (and for) her.
The men in this story are trash, next question.

The standout of this story has to be Los Angeles itself. The glitter and glam, the drugs and sex and gritty excess that is synonymous with Hollywood at that time period really do bolster this whole story. Berman's writing is so clinical and yet intriguing, this book is an odd combination of keeping me hooked and reading, while simultaneously asking when something was going to happen.

Recommend for those who enjoy character driven historical fiction, and a slice-of-life story of the rich and famous behaving badly against the backdrop of LA in the 70s.

Thank you to Berkley and NetGalley for an advance readers copy of this book.

This book might be subtitled “Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll.” Moving between 1965 and 1975, it chronicles the unlikely relationship between two young women, both around 26 years old at the beginning. Lane Warren is new to Los Angeles, a very successful writer, small, attractive, and rather strait-laced, though with a fine mind and wicked sense of humor. Gala Margolis is a Hollywood native, a 6 foot black-haired beauty, sensual, wild, and with few filters on what she says. Lane is a disciplined, award-winning essay writer, who is embarking on her first novel. It is not clear what Gala does, except to have fun by being outrageous and uninhibited in every way. Much of the plot reads like a Sidney Sheldon melodrama written during that time, about determined women who persevere against a tough world.

Despite strong, clear writing, the characters seem one-dimensional, stuck in their roles as “success despite awful childhood, still battling demons;” “super successful, but emotionally tortured closeted gay man;” “disruptive, provocative super-beautiful woman;” and “Ken-doll husband.”

I was a teenager in North Hollywood in the 1960s, a few miles but a world away from the Laurel Canyon depicted as magical in the book. Three of my cousins were ruined by drugs: one with a fatal overdose, another in a mental institution with an early death, the third mired in on-going poverty. Although the book clearly paints a painful picture of drug use, there also is a certain glorification of it. Some people do their best work because of it.

The book also is too long – so many allusions are made to Lane’s dreadful childhood, but a clear picture emerges only very late in the book. This, with the drugs and some sex, and characters I found unsympathetic, means I will not be recommending it to my blog readers.

I know I am not the only one who felt captivated by these characters and Gala and Lane. These women were so damn toxic with each other, and I do NOT wish this type of friend on anyone, because these two women are a hot mess. But I couldn't put this book down.

Lane was the new girl in LA and she was invited to a party where she meets Gala, and not only is she the most talked about woman, like an influencer or sorts. Who is this woman?? even I was captivated by her. Gala reminds me so much of me at times, she is the type of person who will help and support others in their dreams but never brings that same energy to her own dreams, until she did the same for Lane and Lane tried to do the same back. But that alone backfired in the most messed up way.

Gala has gone missing, no one knows where she is, and Lane is trying to find out what happened to her, even though they were never really "friends." We get a back story from their beginnings and both of their downfalls, and the people connected to them as well.

At the same time I never disliked 2 characters more in me whole reading life, lol. UGH it was a good book though lol.

Thank you Netgalley and the Publishers for giving me the opportunity to read this book.

I wanted to love this book so much, but it just didn't do it for me. It felt a bit slow and I just wasn't drawn to the characters.

I review a lot of romance. L.A. Women was definitely not a romance. It also wasn't one where I just loved the characters. These people are very difficult to care for. And yet...I enjoyed the story a lot. Berman creates real people, rather than likable. She shows us the dysfunction in all its ugly forms. It's all compellingly.

Lane is the tortured artist. She's an excellent writer whose second book wasn't loved. She struggles with writer's block or becomes so focuses writing the rest of the world is ignored. She's never known the love parents should show their child. She doesn't know how to love. Yet, she finds people who are drawn to her. Some genuinely. Some for the parties she throws. Some to be close to the famous author, for perceived personal gain for just prestige. Gala is the stereotypical '70s party girl. She lives life fast and wild on her own terms. A groupie, a writer (after Lane encourages her and gives her introductions), a complex and deep character. The two form a strange friendship that alternates between genuine caring, deep loathing, lies, support and betrayals.

When Gala goes missing, Lane is really bothered that she can't find her. As she searches and tries to write a book about Gala, she digs up way more truths than she could have imagined. Had she even thought to imagine them. Some of these truths will blow up Lane's life. Her husband and her best friend have been complicit in keeping horrible facts from her.

The story doesn't have a happily ever after but there is definitely some satisfying growth among the characters. It's a different kind of story and I found it very interesting and well worth the read.

3.75 stars. Deception, betrayal and tragedy all play a role in this twisty tale set in 60/70s LA that follows the complicated relationship + emotional struggles of two completely opposite female writers. Berman has most certainly created an interesting dynamic between the two women, and all plays out within the culture of that era including an added pinch of mystery.
I enjoy character-driven novels and this had that in spades. And I just loved the nostalgic vibes it gave. It is slower paced with not very likable characters and I’m ok with that.
Inspired by the writers Joan Didion and Eve Babitz relationship. Pub. 8/5/25

Thanks to NetGalley for the advanced reading copy in exchange for an honest review.

This book pulled me in right away - set in the dazzling world of 1960's Los Angeles, it follows two brilliant but flawed women caught in the web of ambition, jealousy, and fame. Lane and Gala share a volatile connection that's part friendship, part rivalry, and entirely addictive to read. Decades later, Lane is tasked with telling Gala's story to save her own career - only Gala has disappeared, and with her, the truth. Full of secrets, creative tension, and Old Hollywood drama, this is a compelling read about the fine line between muse and enemy.

ELLA EFFING BERMAN. I have been a big fan of hers for a while. While this is her third novel, each one has such a distinct style and genre. It is a great literary fiction book with a unique plot. I was immersed in both Lane & Gala's worlds together and independently. I usually fly through books but I really took my time with this one because I loved it SO much. 5 stars

4 Stars! Thank you to Berkley Publishing Group for the ARC of this book in exchange for a review, all opinions in this review are my own.

LA Women follows Lane Warren and Gala Margolis through multiple years of their friendship, and eventual falling out. The book begins with Lane learning Gala is missing, which leads to her reflecting on their years together. This book jumps between multiple years, with Lane first arriving in LA, to Gala meeting her rockstar boyfriend, both of their writing career successes, to their eventual friendship falling out, and then Gala missing. With Gala having been gone for months, Lane feels responsible for her disappearance and sets out on a mission to find her, even if it causes her personal life to implode.

At its core, this book is very sad. Gala and Lane are two deeply emotionally damaged women, and their friendship is very toxic and competitive. That said, I loved every minute of this book and all the drama that it held. I also really enjoyed the time period it took place in - LA in the 1960's and 1970's was a cool place, and this book encapsulates that era, and what it took to be a successful woman in that time period, very well.

Overall, definitely recommend reading this one! It's the perfect end of summer read!

This book hooked me from page one...two brilliant, complicated women tangled up in ambition, envy, and the glamour of 1960s LA. Lane and Gala’s friendship (if you can even call it that) is messy and electric, and I loved every bit of their love-hate dance. Now, years later, Lane’s career depends on telling Gala’s story, except Gala’s vanished into thin air. The drama! The secrets! If you love stories about artistic rivalry, old Hollywood, and the thin, dangerous line between inspiration and betrayal, this one’s a must-read.