The Ice Palace (Hesperus Classics)

Discover three unlikely heroines in a collection from the master of the Jazz Age. Featuring "The Ice Palace," "The Jelly Bean," and"Bernice Bobs Her Hair," these selections were chosen to illustrate Fitzgerald's complex female characters.

Sally Carrol Happer is bored with her life in small-town Georgia. Pledging to marry a man from the north, and unswayed by her friends' dismay, Sally Carrol decides to spend the winter up north in order to get to know the family of her intended. But Sally Carroll will soon realize that her dreams of reinventing her life in the chilly northern latitudes might end in a nightmare instead. Bernice from Wisconsin is staying with her trendy cousin Marjorie. Desperate to fit in, Bernice agrees to let her cousin turn her into a society girl, and learns how dance and flirt with boys. But her party piece proves to be her promise to follow the latest fashion and bob her hair--a promise she will live to regret as events take a radical turn for the worse and the girls show their true destructive colors. The beautiful Nancy Lamar wonders if she will be enough to persuade woman-hating Jim Powell to mend his ways. Publicly and drunkenly declaring her love for him towards the end of the evening, she causes Jim to reflect seriously on his life--but will long-lasting change be possible in a Fitzgerald's fickle world?