A Mad Wicked Folly

A Mad Wicked Folly by Sharon Biggs Waller follows Vicky an upperclass girl who is sent home from finishing school after she's caught posing nude in her art school class.  Upon returning home she finds herself engaged to a man she's never met and her father forbids her from her art.  Vicky finds a way around his restrictions, finds herself drawn to the suffragette movement and begins questioning the life that she has grown up with.

This was a fantastic book.  It had all the things that I love in historical romance novels but with a fantastic early twentieth century feminist twist.  Instead of being thrilled to be in the world of debutantes and coming out's Vicky wants to go to college to study the art that she loves.  I adored the descriptions of the clothes, city and the early women's rights movement.  The romance seemed secondary to the story of Vicky finding herself but it was still wonderful and there was a terrifically romantic ending.

Appropriateness:  Vicky is an artist and draws naked men as part of her training.  The drawing is non-sexual and she repeats this several times (although others are outraged) that the drawing is not emotional (although she does have a chaste relationship with her model).  This is a great book to talk to your daughters about feminism and how hard the women in our past had to work so that we could have equal rights.  I recommend it for fans of historical romance 13+