Dark Metropolis
by Jaclyn Dolamore
★★★☆☆
Dark Metropolis is the second novel I’ve read this month that takes place during the Jazz Age, after Genevieve Valentine’s phenomenal The Girls at the Kingfisher Club. Except that Dark Metropolis isn’t explicitly set in the Jazz Age. The world of this novel boasts several cultural signifiers that remind the reader of nothing so much as interwar Berlin—it’s still reeling from a massive war that upset the social order, young women crop their hair and wear lipstick in defiance of their mothers, and the city is filled with the increasingly loud murmurs of revolution. But the details are never nailed down, allowing Jaclyn Dolamore to elaborate and improvise as she sees fit.