Happy hour

In Granados's amusingly mischievous debut, a young ingenue comes to New York City from London for a summer, seeking to bury her grief over her mother's death. By night, Isa Epley and her friend Gala Novak rub shoulders with celebrities and intellectuals. By day, they make ends meet selling clothes on consignment. Gala's gift for being in the right place at the right time opens up new vistas for the impressionable Isa, who records her nighttime adventures in her diary or in notes on her phone ("It's inconspicuous; I look as though I am being aloof and texting, but I am noticing and observing all the time"). All of 21 ("an unserious age," according to her), Isa contents herself with cocktails and the kind of men likely to pay for them, trying to tell the sincere patrons of the arts from the phonies as she pursues a quest for "Social Capital," while Gala comes dangerously close to drifting into a cult. Isa's keen perception lifts this comedy of manners above the surface she and Gala attempt to glide on for the summer's duration ("If I were to describe typical New York conversation, it would be two people waiting for their turn to talk"). This perfectly sums up a new age of innocence. (Sept.)

A pair of beautiful, undocumented party girls live the high life in New York...though they literally do not know where their next meal is coming from. As this glamorous, intelligent debut novel opens, 21-year-old best friends Isa and Gala land in New York to spend the summer. They plan to use their pretty faces as passports to the New York demimonde and to make grocery money by selling dresses at a market stall. Since the latter turns out to be quite the losing operation, they are constantly looking for gigs that pay cash. As audience members at a TV shoot, they "only get fifty dollars each, but collectively, that's at least one late-night cab home, a dozen oysters during happy hour, a small bottle of Tanqueray, and maybe one unlimited seven-day MetroCard." They respond to ads looking for foot models and makeup shoots, one seeking "a pair of friends, one of whom had to be Diverse." ("Diverse" is about all we ever really know about Isa's background; Gala, we learn in a throwaway remark, was a Bosnian baby refugee.) Being members of what one acquaintance calls the "precariat" can be exhausting. When the girls try to improve their minds by attending a boring lecture on the new Belle Epoque touted in the New Yorker, Gala wonders, "Do you think they have a list of who's in the One Percent?" It would certainly make things more efficient. The book, Isa's putative diary, is chock-full of aperçus. On the Red Hook neighborhood of Brooklyn: "Being far away from a subway station must be conducive to making art." On a typical New York conversation: "two people waiting for their turn to talk." On the aloof brutes Isa's always fallen for: "The mind reels with all the possibilities of what they might feel or think about you. Usually it is nothing like what you expect and much less complex than the thoughts you generously assign to them." The girls have known each other since they were at least 16 (that's when Isa spent six months living in Gala's bedroom and Gala got her tooth knocked out at a rave), but this summer will test their friendship and propel them into their next chapters. Like the many cocktails sipped by our discerning narrator: effervescent, tart, and intoxicating. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.