Blue Angel by Jamie Brenner
Jamie Brenner‘s Blue Angel is a smart, sensuous and thoroughly entertaining dive into the electric underbelly of New York City nightlife. This is seduction as literary art: wicked, atmospheric and impossible to put down.
The novel opens with Mallory Dale, a polished young lawyer grinding through her twenty-fifth birthday at her desk when her charming, irrepressible boyfriend Alec sweeps her away to the Blue Angel, a burlesque club glittering on the Lower East Side. From the moment she steps past that blue velvet curtain, Mallory’s carefully ordered world begins to unravel deliciously. Brenner’s rendering of the club is extraordinary. The Blue Angel is smoky, sequined and electric with desire, a place where the rules of ordinary life do not apply.
Behind the Blue Velvet Curtain
Mallory is a compelling protagonist — type-A, self-aware, intellectually sharp and hungry for something she can’t name. Her relationship with Alec crackles with intimacy and tension; he is maddening and magnetic in equal measure, always pushing her just past her comfort zone in ways she both resents and craves. Their dynamic is full of the small negotiations and power plays that define long-term love.
Then there is Bette Noire. Brenner’s star performer is one of the most memorable characters as she is cool, calculating and magnetic. When Bette takes the stage to a cover of “I Put a Spell on You,” her performance is hypnotic. She is a woman who knows exactly what she wants and has built an entire persona around getting it. Her scenes crackle with a kind of controlled menace that is impossible to look away from…