Angie Gazdziak's Reviews > The Impostor Heiress: Cassie Chadwick, The Greatest Grifter of the Gilded Age

This was wild. I kept reading and thinking, "That's it? She just walks out with money?" Apparently folks in the Gilded Age had a lot more trust in one another.

This was a quick read. Pretty fun, and the story kept moving. At times it felt like a work of fiction. The two things that annoyed me most were the timeline and the unfinished paragraphs. Maybe it's b/c I had an ARC but there are chapters that took place before others, so time jumping was annoying (Why am I reading about Dec. 1898 and then jumping back to June 1898? And then the next chapter is January 1899?) It just felt sloppy and didn't lend itself well to untangling Cassie's story. The next thing I disliked is that some paragraphs felt unfinished. I kept waiting for more of an explanation or more detail, but it never comes. In terms of nonfiction, it felt like just a mostly detailed explanation of what happened, and at the end the author tries to tie it back to other crimes and swindlers.

It's a good story, and not one I was familiar with. I wouldn't read it again, but it's a good vacation read about someone who is probably grateful she's been mostly lost to history.