Wild Girls — Erica Abeel

Three college friends from the 50s blaze their own path in love and work, braving the stifling conventions of the age, and anticipating the social thaw that would arrive ten years later. These “wild girls” pay heavy penalties for living against the grain, but, over the years, rebound and re-set their course, drawing strength from their friendship. The novel follows them from an elite northeastern college, to Paris with Allen Ginsberg, to New York's avant-garde scene in the early sixties, to a mansion in Newport, to the slopes of Zermatt, to Long Island's Gold Coast, as it celebrates the nimbleness and vitality of women who defied an entire culture to forge their own journey.

"It's six A.M. in a Paris just coming awake and she's about to climb to the room of Allen Ginsberg.  She pushes open the door of the Beat Hotel, its squawk denting the morning stillness.  No sign of the concierge.  Too early maybe?  In the ancient, dank stairwell she's driven back by odors -- from sinks on the landings doubling as pissoirs, “Turkish traps” on little rises off the steps, last night's cooking cut with sweet ghosts of grass �" all of it finished with a grandaddy note that might be rising from cisterns beneath Paris, maybe from the goddamn Romans.  Breathing through her mouth, she cranes up at a nautilus of stairs spiraling to a skylight.  Hard to imagine Puccini's honey-throated Bohemians here."