review: Strings Attached by Judy Blundell

pub date: March 1, 2011 
publisher: Scholastic
pages: 313
appeals: historical fiction, realistic fiction, mob,
content: pretty clean but some stuff that happened off page

my thoughts:
Very interesting story. I thought it started out kind of slow, but by the end I was into it. I was even crying. It's beautifully written, with well-drawn characters. The historical backdrop was fascinating. It was a time in history I've never read a book about.

Half the story was what took place in Kit's present time, the end of 1950. The other half is told in flashbacks, sometimes only a month or two in the past, other times it was years. How the past was pieced together between the present was really cool and interesting. But by the end, sort of frustrating. I was intent on Kit's present story of what was happening in the fall of 1950, when there was a large chunk of flashback, making me wait to find out.

Once I finished, I thought about the story a lot. Even dreamed about it that night.

blurb:
From National Book Award winner Judy Blundell, the tale of a sixteen-year-old girl caught in a mix of love, mystery, Broadway glamour, and Mob retribution in 1950 New York.

When Kit Corrigan arrives in New York City, she doesn't have much. She's fled from her family in Providence, Rhode Island, and she's broken off her tempestuous relationship with a boy named Billy, who's enlisted in the army.

The city doesn't exactly welcome her with open arms. She gets a bit part as a chorus girl in a Broadway show, but she knows that's not going to last very long. She needs help--and then it comes, from an unexpected source.

Nate Benedict is Billy's father. He's also a lawyer involved in the mob. He makes Kit a deal--he'll give her an apartment and introduce her to a new crowd. All she has to do is keep him informed about Billy . . . and maybe do him a favor every now and then.

As she did in her National Book Award-winning What I Saw and How I Lied, Judy Blundell traps readers in a web of love, deceit, intrigue, and murder. The result? One stunner of a novel.