After six years of writing for the Pittsburgh Dispatch and six months reporting from the wilds of Mexico, Nellie Bly was ready for the larger New York newspaper stage. But breaking into the “men only” world of Newspaper Row there proved more than challenging and Nellie finally devised a way to show them what she could do. She proposed to the editor of the New York World to get herself the inside story of Blackwell’s Island, the city’s notorious women’s asylum for the insane and a place to which no reporters had ever gained entrance, by getting herself committed and staying there for seven days. However, it ended up being ten days that Nellie lived undercover as an inmate. The stories she told, once liberated, opened the asylum and its miserable conditions and questionable practices up to the scrutiny of New York and the world. Her two successive Sunday front-page exposés made Nellie Bly a household name and one to be reckoned with in the New York world of journalism.

THE MAD GIRLS OF NEW YORK is a fictional account of Nellie Bly’s early days in New York and her first big story there. Based on much of Bly’s own writings, the story is an absorbing reading experience and an eye-opening account of women’s lives during the late 1800s.

Nellie’s voice is compelling, and the events are tense and exciting. Included in her story are actual figures from the past and some fabulous auxiliary characters who are composites of real people. I also enjoyed the comments that Nellie imagined her mother would have made had she been there with her daughter. There were snippets and hints about Nellie’s life before coming to New York that intrigued and teased that there is much more to her history than is let on in this first book.

The author seamlessly incorporates details of city life and attitudes of the time, including the disparities of such between the sexes, classes, and races. I particularly enjoyed the sisterhood portrayed among Nellie and her fellow female journalists and their discussions of life’s conditions, their hopes, and dreams of a better future.

I recommend THE MAD GIRLS OF NEW YORK to historical fiction readers, especially those interested in what life looked like for women in the latter part of the 19th century and before suffrage.