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Hotel del Coronado, 1925.

The Hotel del Coronado (famous for the exterior beach scenes in the classic film, Some Like It Hot) was a very pleasant part of last week’s visit to San Diego and the nearby Coronado Island, where I had the chance to freeze my feet off in the ocean and see dolphins. I also admired the hotel: a 125-year-old architectural monster filled with crystal chandeliers, dark wood décor, and 1920s jazz music.

Although the hotel made me happy, it also made me sad. Let’s face it: I don’t always like Phoenix. Phoenix considers architecture from 1970 to be “historic,” and after living in Charleston, South Carolina, I have to tell you people, there is nothing historic about the 1970s. Phoenix is shiny and new, and I do have a place in my heart for skull décor and wild graffiti.

However, San Diego made me realize how much I miss walking the streets of Charleston, surrounded by flickering gas lamps, ivy that’s older than me, and houses that were around during the Civil War.

My need to time travel is more than just architectural. I did love the film Midnight in Paris, because not only did it embrace one of my favorite cities, but the movie embraced a golden culture and a specific time: the “Roaring Twenties,” what the French dubbed “The Crazy Years.” It was the era of jazz music, flappers, and the right for women to vote.

I adore jazz music. As you know, I’ve recently developed a girl-crush on Melody Gardot. Then, on the drive home from San Diego, Pandora showed me Koop and Devil Doll: two other modernized jazz/burlesque groups. Most modern music blows. The stuff you hear on the radio is crap. I’d much rather be enveloped by the trumpet of Louis Armstrong or the quavering alto of Billie Holiday.

Then, there’s the fashion. Oh, the flapper gowns! And feathers! If I lived in the Roaring 20s, I could wear feathers—feathers everywhere—and people would think I was cool, not a Big Bird wannabe.

Plus, let’s not forget: in the twenties, men used to wear suits. Sleek, stylish, expensive suits every single day. I love men in suits, but unfortunately nowadays, most men only wear suits when going to weddings or funerals. Imagine Jake in a suit every day. Glorious!

Let us also bask in the decadence. Not only would I fully be expected to swing dance and bust out the Charleston at all hours of the night, but I could get away with slurpin’ whiskey and smoking cigarettes out of a big, ivory cigarette holder. There would be no Non-Smoking sections. I wouldn’t be a pariah for the occasional coffin nail; the behavior would be expected. Okay, so this isn’t the healthiest reason to go back in time, but hell, I feel like we’re all too damn worried about vitamins and vegetables nowadays. Wouldn’t it be nice to be bad for a little while?

I guess we all have an era: a time when we believe we were supposed to be born. My brother, for instance, would have been perfect in the 60s. Jake would have been happy dancing to Hall & Oates in the 80s. I think I would have enjoyed the 1920s. I miss old things, old places, which were easy to find around every corner in Charleston. I love 20s fashion. I love jazz. Literally, of course, I can’t go back and dance with the flappers. However, maybe I’ll start wearing feathers more often. I can easily add some flapper-esque attire to my wardrobe. I can lock myself in my house and listen to the music I like. And I can visit places like Hotel del Coronado—places that make me feel like, yes, I am home.

Okay, I have to get this off my chest right now: panty hose were invented in the 1950s. Outside of that anachronism, I enjoyed reading the continuing soap opera of the lives of Cordelia, Letty and Astrid. Cordelia is fitting well into the gangster society of her half-brother. Letty has lost her one love, but her singing career is taking off due to being in the right place at the right time. Astrid is kidnapped with a gunny sack over her head, but a blood bath saves her to marry her true love, Cordilia’s brother. What will these girls face next in The Lucky Ones? The big D? Let’s all tune in for the third novel and see. Godbersen is a fine author who keeps the reader wrapped around her little finger.

ENDERS' Rating: *****
Anna's Website

Lorraine knows that Jerome and Gloria are desperate to perform and eat, so traps them with an audition ad tailored to entice. Clara faces having to choose between flirting with flapper life again and wonderful, patient, redeeming Marcus. Her foray into writing for the "Manhattanite" social rag unveiled her wonderful writing, but also lured her like a siren to her wild flapper days. Jillian joyously peppered the dialog with idioms of the time, entertained us with Clara's antics, and had us holding our breath with the building tensions of the entrapment of Jerome and Gloria. Will they make it out of their first performance alive?

ENDERS' Rating: ***
Jillian's Website

Two best friends choose to leave their suffocating lives in rural America and head to the Big Apple to seek their fortunes and happiness. Faced with their first crisis, the two friends part, one to an amazing dream, the other to the streets. Their parallel lives intersect and drift apart once again. Can 1929 New York bring them the happiness both want, or does the cruelty, violence and despair rule everything?

Anna Godbersen just finished the draft of the 2nd book in the series.

ENDERS' Rating: *****

Lucy Moore's wonderful social history of America in the Roaring Twenties, Anything Goes, is featured on Pop Matters, the online magazine of cultural criticism.

Anything Goes: A Biography of the Roaring Twenties revives all of the big names and big events of our most compelling decade – a period that, she observes, in some ways is not unlike the present. It was the Jazz Age; a time of promiscuity and plenty, political corruption and complacency, technology, excess, consumerism and celebrity. This was an epoch of passion and transformation – and with its many social and technological changes, its fetishization of material goods, and its cult of youth and instant celebrity, 1920’s America resonates with today’s culture.
By looking in detail at individual events like Lindbergh’s flight across the Atlantic, the scandal of Teapot Dome and the founding of the New Yorker magazine, this gripping, intimate portrait of the Jazz Age opens windows to many of this country’s most iconic moments.

Author Lucy Moore was born in the United States and moved to Britain to study history at Edinburgh University. Although an American, she was voted one of the “Top Twenty Young Writers in Britain” by the Independent on Sunday.

Coming in March 2010 is a sparkling new social history of America in the 1920s, Anything Goes, by Lucy Moore. Kirkus Reviews offers a sneak preview: "Author Lucy Moore delivers a fast-paced portrait of the 20th-century's fizziest decade, replete with gangsters, flappers, speakeasies and jazz. The author's breezy style synchs nicely with her subject matter, and her focus on the personalities behind the history keeps the narrative engaging. Rather than presenting her material as an extended survey of the period, Moore focuses on a single Jazz Age trope per chapter, resulting in easily digestible takes on prohibition and the high-spirited criminal culture it engendered; the explosion in popularity of jazz music; the evolution of the flapper; the emergence of Hollywood as creator of a national cultural consciousness; the financial scandals of the Harding presidency; the Sacco/Vanzetti and Scopes trials; the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan; the Algonquin round table and the founding of the New Yorker; Charles Lindbergh's historic trans-Atlantic flight; the spectacular boxing career of Jack Dempsey; and the financial devastation of the Wall Street crash that ended the party and ushered in the Great Depression. The author writes more like a novelist than a historian, richly delineating her characters and their milieu. Harding is revealed as a hapless, good-time Charlie hopelessly out of his element as president; Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, beautiful and damned, drink their way across Europe; blues legend Bessie Smith lives large and brooks no fools; and communist anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti emerge as principled, quietly noble figures, unrepentant in the face of a likely gross miscarriage of justice. Moore draws some fairly obvious parallels between the '20s and our contemporary moment—the Wall Street crash, Bush as Harding redux, the gap between emerging technologies and social structures, the cult of celebrity—but the point isn't labored and the fizzing pace never flags. A snappy, vivid account of America's most glittering decade."