Rating: 
Summary: It's FICTION, get over it
Review: For the folks who are disgruntled about the liberties taken with history, I think you'd be good to remind yourself that this is Fiction. Quit being so critical and enjoy Ms. Belfer's talent for storytelling.I have recommended this book to several people who also liked it. It's a good story about a strong woman and her life in a different era (with some historical liberies and contemporary plotting devices). I especially liked the relationship between her and the Afican-American woman--lovely writing.
Rating: 
Summary: Sound and Fury
Review: While this book is a promising first novel, it ultimately, like the sound and the fury, signifies nothing. What hinders the book is the main character, Louisa, who turns out to be more of a whiny martyr than a heroine. In painful redundancy, the author has Louisa remind readers of her many sacrifices rather than allowing her exploits to reveal them. Being the novel's narrator, she left me with little feeling for the other characters, historical or otherwise, in light of her many poor attempts at justifying herself first. However, this book does do a wonderful job in re-creating the social issues in Buffalo at the turn of the century. And the struggles over the new powerstations, and the immiment reign of electrical power, on the Niagra River make for a compelling read. More importantly, it does an admirable job transporting the reader to a city at the height of its glory and the beginning of its downfall. I think the author's efforts would have been more effectively spent if she had written a non-fiction book about the city and people of Buffalo and its fights over nature vs. commerce (i.e. electricity).
Rating:
Summary: buffalo girl won't you come out... in stuffy buffalo
Review: I grew up in Buffalo - my comments are a little unfair because I'm a writer and I know the author can do better. She really captured the Buffalo I knew, whether she knew it or not. When I lived in Buffalo, loved dinners at the Buffalo Club - it was like a trip to another century. I've seen nothing like it anywhere else. I had the distinct impression that the author could be an outsider who went to "Sem" as Macaulay is known in Buffalo and studied well the grandiose, repressive, deluded old cult of specialness that is still alive and taking itself seriously in a tiny self-defined little warp of a universe inside the city. (I wonder if AR Gurney liked this book.) At the risk of sounding like Louisa Barrett, Lauren Belfer knows she can do better, too. It was kinda left-brained, not as imaginitive as it might've been. Maybe she needed a better editor. Really didn't like the ending, don't want to spoil it for others. Read it - anybody who can keep it together for that long a narrative needs to be encouraged. I stayed with her till the end despite the weaknesses. I do appreciate her effort (though I had to peek ahead to see if it was worth it) I got very attached to the little girl. She does understand structure and that's a very big job. She did hold my interest. Her take is interesting to me (environmentalists vs industrialists in that time and familiar setting) Buffalo has produced more than its share of creative contributors to the larger society and I attribute this to that cloudy constriction. I look forward to more from Lauren Belfer, who, like so many of us, moved away.
Rating: 
Summary: A wonderful, enthralling story
Review: Lauren Belfer's City of Light was a stunning, exciting read. Teeming with characters from America's age of the benevolent industrialists, it is a gripping and intricate story woven into the nuances of dynamic history. I loved the narrator, Louisa, and all of her friends, enemies, and associates. Living with her was and continues to be a great privilege. Throughout the story, Belfer writes with frightening comprehension of the social rules of the Victorian age, and how they stifled both women (Louisa and others) and men, driving tiny wedges of deception between even the closest of friends. An engrossing, heartbreaking story about broken trusts and the unseen, inestimable bonds of parental love and loss, I highly recommend City of Light to any and all readers. The best thing I can say of any book is that it captures the imagination, and City of Light did just that.
Rating: 
Summary: A chick book. No stars.
Review: The heroine is but a hapless juvenile. First thing, she is run into a clamp chute and fertilized by a bovine Grover Cleveland. Can you imagine? After you stop laughing at the idiocy you realize that this novel is all down hill from there. And it takes real fortitude to force your way through the 500 pages of empty childish conceit. Searching for just one responsible adult. Again. In one afternoon she declines a marriage proposal, is blackmailed with the life of her daughter, and witnesses an act of industrial sabotage--- what does she do to relieve the stress; She--goes---shopping! The author serves up a menu, all victims: child care, homelessness, immigrant ignorance, emigration, abortion, poverty, racism, classism, elitism, socialism, communism, gay and lesbianism, unionism, urban crime, environmentalism; she has taken all the concerns of the present era and dumped them on a past age, conveniently dead and silent. She paints them all with the wide and soft brush of fo-concern, just a passing notice that the author is nothing if not P.C.; but failing any cogent analysis, any attention beyond the juvenile, any adult consideration whatsoever. When she cannot triangulate a comfortable position between the conflicts, she blames somebody else; how easy, how simple, how liberal, how Clintonesque. She has made a spectrum of historical figures (all white males) simplistically evil so that her characters can be better victims; her obligation to the core of liberal victimology. Chapter after chapter, like so many serial episodes of "Ricki Lake", it's a show , but there is no duty, there is no responsibility, there is no conscience. There is only the chatty , the vacant, the blasé, the self-important. I once attended a university lecture on the regional political conflicts that developed into W.W.II; the speaker ( another female) held up as her reference Herman Wouk's "The Winds of War", a simplistic, easy novel but her required historical reading. The danger of badly written historical novels, beyond being easy and simple, are that their naive messages, appealing to the ignorant, have a way of becoming fact. That somewhere an adult is holding this book up to audience of young people saying "history". That in a rich, selfish, complacent and lazy society the worst, as in any toilet bowl, has a way of floating to the top. "City of Light" floats.
Rating: 
Summary: It was silly, but I read the whole thing
Review: I wish I'd seen the customer reviews before I bought it, all the reviews I read led me to expect more than this silly little historical romance. The imposition of today's more liberal views on the society of 100 years ago has been done before and done more skillfully. Character development was uneven and the plot was obvious. Nevertheless, I read the whole book. It was uneven and disappointing, but I enjoyed parts of it (Grover Cleveland was hysterical) and I hope for more from the next novel.
Rating:
Summary: rather easy to skewer the dead
Review: I wish I could rate this book with no stars! It lifts present day views and sensibilities and places them a hundred years earlier. I would be mortified if any of my relatives were portrayed in this book. Many liberties with real people have been made. Was Grover Cleveland a rapist? Does he deserve to be portrayed in this manner. Many others fare much the same. In the end, I was frustrated with the silliness. I must say I would never suggest this book to anyone, although Elbert Hubbard does get a nice, if somewhat flat, portrayal.
Rating:
Summary: A marvelous read.
Review: As a law student, I don't usually have much time to spend reading novels. But I picked up City of Light one evening upon my Stepmom's recommendation, and I COULD NOT PUT IT DOWN. Every female should read this book. It is beautiful and poignant. Definitely 5 stars!
Rating:
Summary: Afraid of the Dark
Review: As a sometime teacher of literature, I used to tell my students there were three kinds of novels: novels of incident, novels of character, and novels of ideas. Lauren Belfer's City of Light is a novel of incident aspiring to be a novel of character. More disturbing, it has a rudimentary philosophical substructure that could qualify it as a novel of ideas if fully articulated, but, despite the obvious irony that permeates her central metaphor ("City of Light" = "City of Moral Darkness") the author is unwilling is descend to the bottom of the moral vortex she creates. She pulls her heroine back from the brink of realization that free will is a delusion--and so, too, heroism. While Ms. Belfer deserves credit for extensive research (into the 20th-century history of Buffalo, N.Y.) and a fecund imagination that allows her to people the world she has created with a cross-section of social classes, her characters are developed, to the extent they are developed at all, without psychological consistency. When an author chooses a first-person narration, the narrator at least must be all of piece. Louisa Barrett, however, makes a habit of greeting each new day with insouciance, only to encounter a series of distressing personal or societal circumstances: lecherous encounters, industrial accidents, explosions, drownings, fires, mistreated (even misplaced) babies, ethnic antipathies, racist graffiti, reckless endangerment, pornographic drawings, and both statutory and actual rape. Enough to make her wake and claw the sheets at night, one would think, but there is only one episode of her feeling even so much as sick to her stomach at living in this malign and chaotic universe. "Nothing is what it seems," another reviewer has commented, perceptively. Yes, Belfer's moral universe is one of smoke and mirrors. Hence, the novel climaxes in Louise's realization that, despite all her bravery in the face of circumstance, she has been manipulated and deluded by the male industrialists who control her school board, her livelihood, her life--that she has been without free will, has been their pawn and tool. Such a revelation would send most of us staggering back from the abyss, determined to flee this "city of darkness." In a passage apparently without irony (p. 473), Belfer's Louisa shrugs it off, reflecting that whatever motives led to her headmistress-ship (a position analogized throughout to the madamship of a brothel), she has created a school the community can be proud of. So, too, the citizens of Buffalo, painted as a moral cesspool by Lauren Belfer, have expressed pride both in her and in her novel. I can only wonder--did they read the same novel I did?
Rating:
Summary: Enjoyable as a leisurely read.
Review: This is a beautifully written book, and the lead character is wonderful. The machinations she goes through to preserve her position and her dignity in the society that she lives in are what makes this book an enjoyable read. The descriptions of life in Buffalo and the stifling social conventions of the time are fascinating. The book does, however, drag at times, and some of the other characters are not as well fleshed out. Tom Sinclair, a major character, remains a mystery throughout, and Grace, his daughter, is invariably described as perfection itself without really giving her any real life. I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys historical fiction and is not expecting a potboiler, but rather an enjoyable read that can be savored slowly.
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