Seeing these pictures takes Katey back to that fateful time, 1938-39, the year she and her roommate Eve met Tinker Grey and everything changed, a time frozen forever in her memory and never shared with her husband not because it is salacious but because it is too intensely personal. The second picture shows him dirty and poor but strangely alive. The first picture of Tinker Grey shows him as confident, successful, and debonair. Opening in the mid '60s at a photography exhibit, Katey Content sees an old friend pictured twice in the photos taken with a hidden camera on New York subways almost 30 years prior. Cinematic, jazzy, and well-written, this was a fantastic book club read. It has that old Hollywood sensibility to it, a class and a feel that you can't find anymore, but captured here remarkably true and authentic. But instead of a big, brash Hollywood production, it unfurled for me as if it was an old time glamorous black and white movie, and not simply because of the time period in which it is set. Do you ever read a book and see the movie playing in your head when you read along? For me, Amor Towles' debut novel Rules of Civility is the perfect example of this.
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