*Note: These are excerpts from the convo that I have been having with first Rebecca, then we added Catherine in after she finished the book. Then, everything I thought I knew about the book just blew up in my face.
Honestly, the first almost 100 pages are just ok.
As the two girls’ friendship blossoms and they flit between the sparkling underworld of speakeasies by night, and their work at the precinct by day, it is not long before Rose’s fascination for her new colleague turns to obsession.īut just who is the real Odalie, and how far will Rose go to find out? As do her bosses, the buttoned up Lieutenant Detective and the fatherly Sergeant. While she may disapprove of the details, she prides herself on typing up the goriest of crimes without batting an eyelid.īut when the captivating Odalie begins work at the precinct Rose finds herself falling under the new typist’s spell. Every day Rose transcribes the confessions of the gangsters and murderers that pass through the precinct. Rose Baker is an orphaned young woman working for her bread as a typist in a police precinct on the lower East Side. New York City, 1924: the height of Prohibition and the whole city swims in bathtub gin. Not having had heard the term- I looked it up- and became intrigued by the term:Īn unreliable narrator is a narrator, whether in literature, film, or theatre, whose credibility has been seriously compromised. And during that time- there were many rumblings of the “unreliable narrator”.
Overall, a great piece of work and highly recommended for the lovers of historical suspense.So, I read THE OTHER TYPIST back in 2013- right before it was released. Although the tone is rather casual and modern, the author has remained loyal to many of the phrases and traditions used in the period. The novel is written in the first person from Rose’s point of view, and her account of events are very cinematic. In some ways, the world in which Rindell has created for Rose and Odalie, is influenced by Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and she also admits being inspired by the story. This is an intriguing story: Thanks to thorough research, the reader really feels the atmosphere of New York City in the earlier part of 20th century. We couldn’t put this book down…Rindell is a great talent. The encounter sets in motion the stunning conclusion, including a horrifying death, band some savage betrayals. Rose turns a blind eye to these inconsistencies until she and Odalie bump into a yound man from Newport who claims to know a secret about Odalie’s past. But with the arrival of the effortlessly elegant and charming Odalie Lazare, those rules are soon bent as Odalie introduces Rose to a totally unfamiliar realm of speakeasies, smoking, modernist poetry, and bobbed hair.Īs the two young women grow closer and eventually become roommates, Rose discovers many disturbing discrepancies in Odalie’s accounts of her earlier life. Rose Baker’s job is to record the confessions of criminals, and as the prim-and-popper graduate of a convent orphanage, she prides herself on following every rule. The Other Typist is the result of this and, to be honest, it’s a fantastic debut.Ī plain young typist working for the New York Police Department in the 1920s becomes obsessed with a glamorous and mysterious co-worker, with shocking results. A typist in a New York City Police Department precinct, Rose. As part of her dissertation on women in the Victorian era, she came up with the idea of writing a suspense novel happening in 1920s New York and a female protagonist. With a few strokes of the keys that sit before her, she can send a person away for life in prison. Suzanne Rindell is a doctoral student in American modernist literature at Rice University and lives in New York City.
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