Book excerpt: "A gem of a story" (Laura Moriarty) about the famed Barbizon Hotel in which three spirited young women form an unlikely friendship and come of age in 1955 New York. For a small-town girl with big-city dreams, there is no address more glamorous than New York’s Barbizon Hotel. Laura, a patrician beauty from Smith, arrives to work at Mademoiselle for the summer. Her hopelessly romantic roommate, Dolly, comes from a working-class upstate town to attend secretarial school. And then there's Vivian, a brash British bombshell with a disregard for the hotel’s rules. Together, the girls embark on a journey of discovery that will take them from the penthouse apartments of Park Avenue to the Beat scene of Greenwich Village to Atlantic City’s Steel Pier??—??and into the arms of very different men who will alter their lives forever.