Astor Place Vintage by Stephanie Lehmann

Astor Place Vintage by Stephanie Lehmann blends New York City and vintage fashion into a marvelous book that transports you to NYC 100 years ago, as well as modern day NYC, and keeps it current with memorable characters in both eras.

Book Description

“Amanda Rosenbloom, proprietor of Astor Place Vintage, thinks she’son just another call to appraise and possibly purchase clothing from a wealthy, elderly woman. But after discovering a journal sewn into a fur muff, Amanda gets much more than she anticipated. The pages of the journal reveal the life of Olive Westcott, a young woman who had moved to Manhattan in 1907. Olive was set on pursuing a career as a department store buyer in an era when Victorian ideas, limiting a woman’s sphere to marriage and motherhood, were only beginning to give way to modern ways of thinking. As Amanda reads the journal, her life begins to unravel until she can no longer ignore this voice from the past. Despite being separated by one hundred years, Amanda finds she’s connected to Olive in ways neither could ever have imagined.” – Astor Place Vintage

My Thoughts

Astor Place Vintage is the type of book that you can get lost in. The author is able to artfully weave the story around 1907 and 2007 NYC without making it feel like two very different stories within the same book.

Amanda finds an old journal written by a woman who moved to Manhattan 100 years ago. As a store owner of a vintage clothing boutique, you never know what gems you’ll uncover when out buying clothes, but this find becomes much more than she could ever expect.

On the surface, reading this book and thinking back about what life was like 100 years ago, it is very different. However, much remains the same and will probably be similar even 100 years from now. This is what makes the book so heartfelt and relatable. Sure, the scenes in NYC, and reading about fabulous clothes is fun, but the people and their relationships is the real story.

If you love reading about fashion or New York City, this is definitely a book you will want to read! I highly recommend it.

* Thank you to the publisher of Astor Place Vintage, Touchstone, for providing me with a copy of this book for review. All opinions expressed are my own.