From Publishers Weekly
In the rural French town of Senlis, mild-mannered, middle-aged tailor Claude Reynaud fashions wedding gowns, dresses and suits for Parisian women in the know; for the locals, he repairs torn seams, sews on buttons and alters hemlines. Claude's predictable life turns upside down when the charming
parisienne Valentine de Verlay commissions him to make her wedding dress, and he falls in love with her. Claude's wife left him eight years ago (but, we learn early on, no divorce papers have been signed), and Valentine's fiancé, Victor, is a singularly unlikable, one-dimensional character (whose last name, of all things, is "Couturier"). Claude and Valentine couple early on, but, despite being in love with Claude, Valentine stays on track for the marriage to Victor. When Claude joins up with a major Paris designer to be closer to Valentine, former
Cosmopolitan columnist Oberbeck cleverly portrays Claude's entrée into high fashion, but she makes a weak case for Claude's dislike of all the attention. An inexplicably tragic side plot involving the teenage girlfriend of one of Claude's nephews further derails the proceedings. Oberbeck successfully creates the intrigue one wants for a wedding gown designer who falls in love with his client and vice versa, but doesn't manage it all the way through to the principals' New York collision.
(July) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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From Booklist
Oberbeck, a writer for
Cosmopolitan and
Glamour, injects an unexpected twist into the French fashion scene in her debut novel. She has built her romantic tale around a far-from-glamorous dressmaker, Claude Reynaud, who eschews the Parisian fashion runways, opting instead to design his wedding dresses and hand-sewn gowns in the small town outside Paris where he learned his trade from his father and grandfather. Claude, divorced, has no children, but dotes on his nephews, and has convinced himself he is happy living with only his loquacious parrot. But then his mundane existence is upended by Valentine de Verlay, a bride-to-be who comes to Claude to design her wedding dress and rekindles feelings he thought had died forever. Oberbeck chronicles their doomed romance on its dizzying journey to Paris and New York, during which Claude is amazed that a beauty like Valentine would find him at all appealing. Oberbeck's romp is as light and frothy as one of Claude's chiffon creations, yet it is also an engaging dissection of high fashion and those who determine its whimsical direction.
Deborah DonovanCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
