Review:
If you are looking for a page turner, then look no further because Savage Girl will keep you on the edge of your seat and wanting to find out what happens next! The story of Savage Girl is told by Hugo Delegate’s son during the Gilded Age, years 1875-1876. Zimmerman does a fantastic job with transferring us the reader back in time with the horse driven and mucked streets of New York where high French fashion ruled. I really felt like I was back there and could see everything Delegate’s son mentions. The story that stands out the most is that of a young woman Bronwyn who raised by wolves and saved by Delgates family. Bronwyn is eighteen and beautiful, only then men that look at her as suitors end up dead. Who is killing them? You’ll have to read to find out as I kept turning the pages, Zimmerman creates such mystery and suspense. You’ll have to read Savage Girl!
Book Blurb:
Jean Zimmerman’s new novel tells of the dramatic events that transpire when an alluring, blazingly smart eighteen-year-old girl named Bronwyn, reputedly raised by wolves in the wilds of Nevada, is adopted in 1875 by the Delegates, an outlandishly wealthy Manhattan couple, and taken back East to be civilized and introduced into high society.
Bronwyn hits the highly mannered world of Edith Wharton–era Manhattan like a bomb. A series of suitors, both young and old, find her irresistible, but the willful girl’s illicit lovers begin to turn up murdered.
Zimmerman’s tale is narrated by the Delegate’s son, a Harvard anatomy student. The tormented, self-dramatizing Hugo Delegate speaks from a prison cell where he is prepared to take the fall for his beloved Savage Girl. This narrative—a love story and a mystery with a powerful sense of fable—is his confession.
Info about the book:
SAVAGE GIRL by Jean Zimmerman, a gripping historical tale that is both a thrilling mystery and a romance, engrained with fable and history in a contentious period of American life as industrialization moves westward, swallowing Indigenous cultures and breaking land to build trains and mine coal.
SAVAGE GIRL was described by Booklist, “Suffused with a gothic aura of dark suspense, this is a finely wrought psychological work from the author of The Orphanmaster (2012), rich with historical detail… Immensely readable, SAVAGE GIRL takes the reader by the throat and doesn’t let go.” There are also reviews in the works from Good Housekeeping and O, The Oprah Magazine. Jean Zimmerman’s previous novel, The Orphan Master, was named one of 2012’s Best Historical Fiction by NPR.
We have prepared a beautiful book club kit for SAVAGE GIRL readers with drink, music (available on Spotify!), and discussion suggestions and a special Q&A with Jean Zimmerman. Please check it out online here and share with your fellow readers!