A sweeping Jazz Age tale of regret, ambition, and redemption inspired by true events, including the Great Moonshine Conspiracy Trial of 1935 and Josephine Baker’s 1925 Paris debut in Le Revue Nègre
1924. May Marshall is determined to spend the dog days of summer in self-imposed exile at her father’s farm in Keswick, Virginia. Following a naive dalliance that led to heartbreak and her expulsion … led to heartbreak and her expulsion from Mary Baldwin College, May returns home with a shameful secret only to find her father’s orchard is now the site of a lucrative moonshining enterprise. Despite warnings from the one man she trusts—her childhood friend Byrd—she joins her father’s illegal business. When authorities close in and her father, Henry, is arrested, May goes on the run.
May arrives in New York City, determined to reinvent herself as May Valentine and succeed on her own terms, following her mother’s footsteps as a costume designer. The Jazz Age city glitters with both opportunity and the darker temptations of cocaine and nightlife. From a start mending sheets at the famed Biltmore Hotel, May falls into a position designing costumes for a newly formed troupe of African American entertainers bound for Paris. Reveling in her good fortune, May will do anything for the chance to go abroad, and the lines between right and wrong begin to blur. When Byrd shows up in New York, intent upon taking May back home, she pushes him, and her past, away.
In Paris, May’s run of luck comes to a screeching halt, spiraling her into darkness as she unravels a painful secret about her past. May must make a choice: surrender to failure and addiction, or face the truth and make amends to those she has wronged. But first, she must find self-forgiveness before she can try to reclaim what her heart craves most.
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After women won the right to vote in 1920, the decade ahead stretched before them as a glittering path to new opportunity. It was the jazz age. But in her debut novel, Etiquette for Runways, Liza Nash Taylor reveals a darker side of those famously dazzling years as a woman alone fights to carve her niche in the world of fashion design. Ambition. Greed. Betrayal. Redemption. From rural Virginia to New York city to Paris, through beautiful prose and vivid historical details I felt the pain and the joy of one woman’s struggle to succeed against the odds. I did not want this book to end.
Etiquette for Runaways is a complex, fascinating novel full of wonderful characters and more than a little heartbreak. May Marshall is a heroine to cheer for, a girl who dares all to confront her own demons and achieve her dreams in New York and Paris. The writing is glorious, the story is completely engaging. This is a must-read.
Taylor’s sweeping coming-of-age story is utterly engrossing, exquisitely rendered, and deeply felt, with a rich cast of characters that linger in the heart and mind long after the final page is read. May Marshall is a heroine for any age — Jazz or otherwise — and her battles feel as intimate and immediately recognizable as our own.
Assured, exotic, heart wrenching, Liza Nash Taylor’s Etiquette for Runaways is that rare debut novel that combines a story that sweeps from continent to continent and age to age without sacrificing the deeply personal story of one tormented woman. Taylor’s May Marshall is the new woman of a previous century, a jazz dolly with a scarred past and a hungry heart who wants forgiveness from the only one who cannot give it — herself.