Park Avenue Summer by Renée Rosen

Publisher: Berkley
Publication Date: April 30th 2019
Pages: 368
Review copy from publisher

It's 1965 and Alice Weiss has just moved from Ohio to New York City. Her dream is to become a professional photographer. Her mom, who sadly passed away, has a friend in New York City, Elaine, who works at a big publishing house  andmight help Alice find a job. And she finds one; at Hearst as an assistant of Helen Gurley Brown, the newly appointed editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine. Cosmopolitan is not doing well. Selling numbers have been going back for years and Helen is sort of the last straw to safe the magazine. The articles in the magazine where mostly written by men and during the book Helen wants to change this, which leads her to a lot of criticism and people from the magazine working against her behind her back. An employee from the magazine, a true womanizer called Erik, is trying to lure Alice to spy on Alice for him and give him all the inside information on what Helen is working on for the magazine. Alice stands up to him and stays true to Helen, altough she gets a few a no-strings attached dates with Erik. Meanwhile she is a big support for Helen, who tries to makes a succes of the upcoming July and truly wants to make it a magazine for the single working girl who loves fashion, beauty, but this is met by a lot of resistance. Meanwhile Alice is meeting with her new friend Christopher, who is a professional photographer and takes Alice with him on shoots in the city to gain experience. The July numbers hit the records though and the magazine seems to be saved, but not until, with the help of Alice two moles who have been leaking to other magazines are fired. And then Alice get's a photography job offer that leaves her to choose for herself or for Helen.

I really enjoyed this beautiful and entertaining read, it was very good from the first to the last page. It was entertaining to read from Alice's point of view how and why she landed in New York, and how she got her job at Cosmopolitan. I never knew about the history of Cosmopolitan and Helen Gurley Brown and what she meant for the change of the magazine world. She had quite a though job to make people see the vision she had for it and that it worked out in the end, as the magazine still exists worldwide. 
Further on, the story is just a perfext mix and balance of fact and fiction. And the end was just perfectly wrapped up. This book was just a perfect one and one of a kind!