REVIEW: The Beauty of Individual Things: A Prohibition-Era Love Story by K. Thomas Yoo
The Beauty of Individual Things follows Margot Andrews, a young American woman swept from New York high society into the dazzling yet fractured world of 1920s London. When the transactional demands of privilege collide with betrayal and violence, leaving her disillusioned and adrift, she escapes to the freshwater shoreline of lost childhood summers.
With her past unrecoverable and her future uncertain, Margot searches for a different life amid Detroit’s dynamic and monied Prohibition era—with its yacht races, rumrunners, and industrial might. Set against a city on the rise, she must navigate her family’s ruthless pursuit of social standing, the magnetic pull of charismatic boat racer Ellis James, and the relentless echoes of her past. The story explores the weight of loneliness and the personal cost of love and reinvention as Margot decides whether to remain a fragile ornament of her family’s design or forge an identity that is beautiful, imperfect, and entirely her own.
CW/TW – loss of a pregnancy, mental health issues, spousal abuse, alcoholism, child neglect
Dear Ms. Yoo,
It was the cover. That is a gorgeous cover and it caught my eye and got me to read the blurb and here we are. As I read more, I got the feeling which I never could shake, that I was reading a sort of nighttime 1920s soap opera show like Dynasty or Dallas.
I’ll be honest and say that I was really enjoying most of this book. Margot is a somewhat tortured young woman. Her childhood is rather ghastly with parents who don’t get along partly due to her father’s (implied) mental illness (maybe bipolar?) and her mother’s arty joie de vivre which often descends into self-centered drunkenness. Parental grandma decides that Margot’s chances for a good social marriage are ruined in the US and Margot is shipped off ‘willy-nilly’ to London (after sprucing up her wardrobe in Paris) to “marry well.”
One disastrous marriage later (it’s pretty obvious from the start and she was warned) and Margot flees back to the US. Still wandering around trying to “find herself” she builds on a budding interest in garden designing to try and forge her own way. That’s when she gets dragged back to nouveau riche family in Michigan for a summer to work on a garden for her engaged cousin that will also be a thesis for Margot for school. Then she meets Ellis James, a working class man who has earned a fortune from his racing boats. Will Margot finally chart her own course in business and love?
So yes, I liked a lot of this messy look at privilege, upper-classness, angst, drinking (lots of drinking even during Prohibition as they’re right across the border from Canada), family clashes, social standing, and angst. Yes, I meant to repeat that.
Margot has sort of stood on the periphery of her family for most of her life. At first we get what I thought are glimpses of Margot having mental health issues of her own during boarding school for rich girls but this disappears after a while. Her mother is a flake, her grandmother is a Grand Dame of Social Propriety, her Aunt Lou is a powerhouse who sometimes seems to like Margot but mostly appears to despise her. Cousin Grace is drinking her way through her engagement summer and (never really explained) bizarre relationship with her fiance. I guessed about the fiance and had to assume why Aunt Lou was strong-arming Grace.
Margot and Ellis seem to fall into a wonderful relationship – aside from Muriel who is the grasping woman always ready to butt in and make a grab for him. But all through this, if my description has made it clear, is the definite feel of an angsty soap opera. Things are great until things aren’t great. Margot is surrounded by family and old friends who drink like fishes and at times Margot tipples too much, too. Aunt Lou and her housekeeper are mainly gorgons until at times they’re not.
The plot sort of swirls around except when the tension or drama needs to be ramped up but, yeah, I was still zipping along with it. Then Drama happens and suddenly with about 50 pages left to go I’m thinking WTF? I’ve got the feeling I’ve somehow ended up in one of those books labeled “utterly and absolutely heartbreaking.” Eventually it winds its way back, via psychiatric help plus cryptic and short phone calls, to a HEA that I honestly don’t really believe while also giving short precises about the (usually unhappy) endings of several other characters. The epilogue is supposed to tie things up with a bow but by this point, I just wanted it to end.
If you want historical (and I will admit that the details and research at top notch) angst during Prohibition and want to be put through an emotional wringer, I think this book might be for you. I was left bewildered at times at how relationships were mended and didn’t buy the HEA. B (for most of it)/ and C- (for the end).
~Jayne
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