I Like Your Dress

The other day I picked up a book I normally wouldn't even look at, I'm not sure why I did, but I'm glad 'cause it was a fun little read.  The book is called A Vintage Affair by Isabel Wolff. 

It is about a woman Phoebe Swift who after a bad break up and the loss of her best friend moves to the London area to open her own vintage clothing shop. Along the way she meets several new friends including the elegant French woman Therese Bell who sells some of her clothes to the shop.  There are two different story lines throughout the book, the main one about Phoebe adjusting to her new life and the secondary one which is a concurrent flashback with parallels stories of the two women Phoebe and Therese (wow that sounded like a sentence from a college creative writing class heehee) The secondary story line about how both women lost a friend, Therese to the concentration camps, and Phoebe to a bad combination of circumstances.  They both carry around guilt, thinking that they in some way are at fault, in the end they help each other see that they are not to blame and are able to move on, in fact they find out that Therese friend actually survived and had a family of her own.  While this story line is the reason both women are where they are, to me it was a little tacked on/melodramatic feeling.  It is touted as a big mystery, but it is pretty easy to figure out the basic stories and the big reveals are much less shocking then they are set up to be.  On the other hand I really enjoyed the main story, it flowed fairly naturally, had some believable tension and touched on several parts of Phoebe's recent life, you really understood why she is the way she is. 

I need this dress!

My favorite part though is the store!  Ms. Wolff must really like vintage clothes because she really did her research.  The clothes are described in amazing detail, and the stories and histories behind a lot of them are really cool. She gives you a pretty good visual of the store ( I totally want to shop there!) and the customer interactions are priceless.  The sub-story with the cupcake dresses is one of my favorites. I was glad that so much of the story actually did take place in, around and for the shop so you really could get into it.  The author also did a good job of incorporating all the fashion into the story in a very natural way so it wasn't just a list of clothes.   All in all I really enjoyed this book, it's perfect for at the beach or curled up in your fluffy robe. Even if your not into chic lit (which I usually am not) the flavor and originality make it worth checking out. It made me want to go vintage clothes shopping!

Let me know what you think!