Cinderella's Dress. Shonna Slayton. 2014. 320 pages. [Source: Library]
First sentence: Nadzia tucked the cleaning rag into her apron in exchange for her feather duster.
Premise/plot: Except for the prologue which has a more "once upon a time" feel to it, Cinderella's Dress is set in the mid-to-late 1940s. (It opens in 1944, and, I believe, wraps up around 1947?) Kate Allen, our heroine, discovers that she may just be the next keeper for Cinderella's magical dresses. At the start of the novel, Kate is clueless. Cinderella a real person??? A real person with magical dresses??? She hadn't a thought to such things. Ridiculous, right? But when Elsie and her husband Adalbert show up in New York City during the Second World War with a trunk they've risked their lives smuggling out of war-torn Europe, well, she gives it some consideration. Elsie claims to be the current keeper. The trunk holds the dresses, THE DRESSES. But magic is a tricky, tricky thing. Meanwhile as Kate is processing all this possible magic that is somehow, someway connected to her family, her life unfolds in all its messiness. Her mother wants her to be a a) model b) actress c) model-actress. She has big plans for her daughter to make it big, big, big. Kate's goals, however, are to become a window dresser at a department store. To design the windows that make crowds oooh and aaah. The kind of window displays that draw customers in and keep them spending money. But she'll face some discrimination--because that is man's work, of course--and she's so very young, still a teenager.
Getting her hand on THOSE DRESSES may just be the break she needs in the window dressing business, but flashing her family's secrets may just lead to a life-and-death situation.
My thoughts: I liked this one okay. I did. I didn't hate it. I just felt Kate was a bit stupid at times. The plot depended on her being so stupid, so maybe it isn't solely her fault. But still. I liked elements of this one certainly. I found Elsie's story to be heartbreaking. Not that that was the focus of the story, it wasn't, but I couldn't help but feel saddened watching that back story unfold. Elsie and Adalbert are so in love, yet, her dementia is taking her away from him and everyone else as well.
© 2022 Becky Laney of Becky's Book Reviews
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