Broadway Limited, Volume 1: Dinner with Cary Grant, Malika Ferdjoukh

Jocelyn Brouillard, sixteen and a half years old, a French scholarship student, arrives at the Giboulée boarding house one autumn evening in 1948. It's a mistake, a complete misunderstanding. He's in New York, and he was mistaken for a young lady because of his first name. For the Giboulée boarding house is one of those boarding houses exclusively reserved for young women who want to stay safe from the wolves of Wall Street and 42nd Street. Men are absolutely forbidden there. Fortunately, Jocelyn plays the piano very well... Coming from all corners of America, these young women dream of conquering the big city, of seeing their names at the top of Broadway theaters. At Giboulée, there are 6 of them. There's Chic, who does commercials for very pink egg shampoo, or for very red Campbell's soups that she hates, and who receives shoehorns from her many admirers... There's the baroque Ursula, who sings on the radio, Etchika who drives a car with a femme fatale's name... And as if that wasn't enough, in the house next door lives Dido, a high school student who has problems with the FBI. And what would their landladies, the respectable Mrs. Merle and her dragon of a sister, say if they learned that, behind her serious girl's glasses, the enigmatic Manhattan has mysterious dates with gentlemen in Greenwich Village bars, or that Page, with her charming blonde braids, is in love with the wrong person? Finally, there's Hadley, who sells doughnuts by day and matches by night, and who is perhaps the most elusive of them all. Hadley is the lucky girl who once danced with Fred Astaire... Yes, the great Fred Astaire! But then why did she suddenly stop dancing? This diptych owes its title to the Broadway Limited, the fabulous and mythical train that connected Chicago to Pennsylvania Station in the center of New York... For this novel also takes the train. BROADWAY LIMITED tells of a young Frenchman's discovery of the American way of life in post-war New York, its vitality, its energy, jazz, swing, Broadway, pizza, radio, its breathtaking snowstorms, baseball... But also its phobias, the beginning of the Cold War, the witch hunt, segregation...