A good, solid, and well-paced read. Schulman sets up very interesting, believable characters, and while she clearly has strong interests in leftist and marginalized political histories, I appreciate that she avoids plot predictability; that is, she avoids any temptation to make characters from historically marginalized groups noble and two-dimensional, and shows them instead with all their flaws and strengths. I appreciated that Schulman anticipates readers' familiarity with how gender and race politics impacted people's lives, and constructs her narrative to avoid straightforward and predictable plotlines.

The book follows the intersection of several lives in NYC in the 1950s, narrated from three main perspectives: Sylvia Golubowsky, an aspiring reporter; Austin Van Cleeve, a conservative society reporter; and N. Tammi Byfield, granddaugher of Cal Byfield, a playwright struggling to have his work recognized beyond the category of "Negro theater." Each character tells their story against the backdrop of the anti-Communist hearings in Washington, and each approaches politics with varying degrees of naivete or sophistication, of personal and public.

I read this sporadically, over a couple of weeks, and should have actually focused more intently on it; some of the details of the McCarthy hearings escaped me upon returning to the book, so found myself a bit confused in parts. The details of NYC in the 1950s are well-evoked, and Schulman weaves in the concrete details of the 3 characters' very different lives in a vivid way. ( )