BOOK REVIEW: Nine Women, One Dress

Synopsis

« A beautiful dress holds a little bit of magic in it.”

A charming, hilarious, irresistible romp of a novel that brings together nine unrelated women, each touched by the same little black dress that weaves through their lives, bringing a little magic with it.

So says Morris Siegel, and he should know.  He’s been a leading garment district pattern-maker for decades.  But before he retires, he’s got one more beautiful design in him….

It’s this dress, instantly crowned the must-have dress of the season, that we follow as it flits from the runway to the ladies’ dress department at Bloomingdales and from there in and out of the lives of nine very different women.

Natalie is a Bloomingdale’s salesgirl mooning over her lawyer ex-boyfriend, who’s engaged to someone else after just two months. Felicia has been quietly in love with her boss for 17 years and has one night to finally make the feeling mutual. Andie is a private detective who specializes in gathering evidence on cheating husbands – a skill she unfortunately learned from her own life – and lands a case that may restore her faith in true love.

For these three women, as well as half a dozen others in sparkling supporting roles – a young model fresh from rural Alabama; a diva Hollywood star making her Broadway debut; and an overachieving, unemployed Brown grad who starts faking a fabulous life on social media, to name just a few – everything is about to change thanks to the dress of the season, the perfect little black number everyone wants to get their hands on….

My review, my thoughts:

This is not a recent book, it was released in 2016, but it was only very recently that I saw suggestions on my GoodReads app (a real gold mine to make me spend a lot of money on books loll). I thought it would be an easy, light summer read…. Not that much, yes easy to read, almost in one sitting (it depends on how many hours you have in front of you), but not that light.

I loved the way Rosen describes these 9 women whose lives will change because of this little black dress, THE black dress, The dress of the season that everyone is snatching up in New York, The Max Hammer dress (designer), you know, the little black dress that we are chasing and that we all want? I don’t know about you, but I am constantly looking for the perfect little black dress for all occasions 😊. Looks like I can never get enough, every time I see one, I tell myself, ahhh maybe it is IT… It’s our “Go to” as they say.

In short, I loved the way the stories intertwined. Each chapter deals with a different character. These 9 women all have their history, their experience, which makes them endearing, and we always want to know a little bit more about them. I had trouble putting the book down for supper or my other tasks, a bit like a “thriller” but it’s not a thriller. Obviously, we come across some mean characters we like to hate and a little “good old-fashioned romance”.

All of this because Morris Siege, a great 90-year-old pattern maker on the eve of his retirement, had the chance to flee from Poland (by boat), at the age of 13, for America with a capital A (New York more precisely) just before WWII. From the very beginning of this journey, he met Max Hammer who had big dreams, and since that day, they have become inseparable. Before his retirement, he still has 1 dress to create, and it quickly becomes THE sensation.  We follow it from the runway fashion to the ladies’ department store at Bloomingdales and then in and out of the lives of these 9 very different women.

I liked the atmosphere of the “runways”, and to feel the atmosphere of the big retail stores in New York, of the Bloomingdales where I went at the age of 18 for the 1st time, with sparkling eyes, I had to buy something just to say that I bought something, a Calvin Klein pajamas (I even asked the cashier to give me the Bloomingdales hangers with Bloomingdales written on it ahahahah!) So cheesy. I liked to read about the popular and emblematic places of New York that I love, like Central Park, the Grand Central Station, the Brooklyn Bridge, The Plaza Hotel (where thecharacter of Big in Sex inthe City lives). Awww New York I love you. It allowed me to travel a bit, the time of a book.

I am a very visual girl, so I often get influenced by the cover of a book. This one caught my attention.

All I can add is that I would love to see this book brought to the screen.

This cover made me think of 2 other books that I own and that I read a long time ago: (my books on the pictures are in french, but I put the original titles for you)

I will leave you with an excerpt from the book that I really liked, it’s Morris Siegel’ speech, a night given in his honor, before his retirement:

« For seventy-five years I have made ladies’ dresses. That means that for seventy-five years I have made women happy.  For seventy-five years I have made mature women spin around in front of the mirror like young girls.  For seventy-five years I have made young girls look in the mirror and for the first time see a woman staring back at them.  I have made young men’s eyes pop out.  I have made old men’s eyes pop out.  Because the right dress does that.  It makes an ordinary woman feel extraordinary.  It’s just not often that they get to wrap themselves up in a bow and show the world.

On the occasions that they do, the dress is everything.  No one receives an invitation to dinner or a wedding or a ball and says, ‘Oh, I need to buy a new hat’.  They say, ‘I need to buy a new dress’.  No one spends weeks searching for the perfect sweater or blouse, but the search for the perfect dress can lead a woman to visit every store in the city.  It’s the dress that needs the right bag, the right shoes, and the right shade of lipstick, never vice versa.  The dress a girl wears to a prom, on her first trip down the aisle, even on her second, is probably the biggest decision of the night.  In fact a bride may spend more time contemplating the dress than the actual proposal.  I can promise you it wasn’t those ill-fitting glass slippers that gave Cinderella the confidence to crash that ball.  It was the dress—the dress made her do it.”

Hope you will enjoy this book as much as I did!

You can get your copy of the the book HERE.