A review by corriejn
The Gilded Years by Karin Tanabe

2.75

Looked interesting (and is based on a historical person) but it's really not very good writing. It's in serious need of a narrative voice, instead of stiltedly having various characters describe and explain situations via awkward and unrealistic dialogue or letters. That aspect gets slightly better as the book goes on (though never disappears entirely), but the writing still feels fairly immature/undeveloped. Plenty of irrelevant side details (if a side character only shows up in passing for a couple lines of the book, you don't actually need to always give both their full name and what they go by to their friends), lengthy descriptions of clothing or decor that feel like the author wanted to include any info researched about the era (but couldn't come up with a more skillful/better-integrated way to do so), and there are at least a handful of easily fact-check-able anachronisms in topics/terminology discussed by characters. 

I decided to give it at least til the main conflict of the story, but that comes pretty late in the book (and fairly suddenly?) and does not improve things.

Readers can decide for themselves how they feel about this aspect, but it's also a... choice, for a non-Black woman (like Anita Jennings, the author is also a Vassar alum, but has described herself in interviews as being the child of parents from Japan and Belgium) to decide to be the one who should write this story. She is clearly a big fan of her alma mater though, and it kind of reads like what she really wanted was just an excuse to set a novel at Vassar.