It’s 1984. Adrift after college, Phoebe finds herself in NYC, hoping to find something to excite her and help her figure out what she wants from life. After the death of her beloved father, she comes back to the city against her family's wishes and finds an apartment on the Lower East Side with a college acquaintance, Carmen.
Carmen, shrugging off the yoke of a privileged childhood, and Phoebe find themselves in the midst of the wild club scene, where celebrities and junkies mingle. Carmen takes up with a junkie, while Phoebe is still seething about the way she was mistreated by an older man. Phoebe is desperate to make money and finds an opportunity telling fortunes at club parties as “Astrid the Star Girl.”
Drugs and sex and the glamorous life prove too intoxicating to resist, and it’s not long before Phoebe and Carmen’s friendship ends with a betrayal. Both young women hit rock bottom in their own way, but can they find their way and survive despite the chaos of the city, where young women are actually going missing?
I love everything about the 80s and so I really enjoyed the setting of Astrid Sees All. Even though I wasn’t old enough for the party scene at that time, I remember NYC when it was seedy and gritty, and Standiford really captured that so well.
While I didn’t necessarily find the characters sympathetic, I felt the sense of sadness and fear and uncertainty that seemed to exist beneath the surface of the story, the “smile although you’re crying inside” mentality that characterized the atmosphere and the time. It was a really vivid book.
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