highlyeccentric (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
highlyeccentric) wrote2019-01-06 08:56 am
highlyeccentric) wrote2019-01-06 08:56 am
Entry tags:
Review: The Dressmaker of Draper's Lane (Liz Trenow)
I was glad to receive this ARC via netgalley, but regret to report that I’m dissatisfied with the book. It’s hard to put a finger on why, but it neither pulled me in with its plot nor impressed me as a work of historical fiction craft.
The good:
This is a book about a successful single businesswoman, with a complex and fulfilling life, including family and friends, who starts the book single and ends it single. She has complicated feelings about her family, and her relationship to parenthood (she herself is a foundling, reunited with her family later in life), but not only is it not solved through marriage, she never even considers that.
It’s rare to find a book that is *about family and intergenerational complexity*, which follows a single female protagonist, but is not about that protagonist’s marriage or lack thereof. If that’s something you’re looking for, this might be the book for you.
The bad:
Firstly, I was unimpressed with this as a work of historical fiction. It engages pretty closely with certain elements - I don’t know all that much about 18th c fashion, but it seemed to be doing a good job there. Court politics, likewise. Unfortunately, I fell incredibly awry of the whole thing over religious sentiment. A fairly major character is a brimstone protestant vicar, who *sends his sister-in-law to a nunnery to give birth out of wedlock*, and no one, not the vicar, not the woman in question, *no one* comments on the religious difference between them and the nuns. I’m not actually sure what form ‘sending her away’ would have taken for 18th century protestants (no shotgun wedding was considered - I suspect a more logical course of action would have been to magic up a clerical favor-ower to marry the sister-in-law), but even if it involved nuns they ought to have *had opinions about the religious difference*.
Secondly, it sounds petty to say that that ruined the entire book for me, but. Nothing else about the book captivated me, I suppose. I don’t know much about the 18th century clothing trade, I should be easy to captivate with detail - but it all felt mechanical. The prose was flat. By and large I didn’t really care about anyone except the protagonist, and the extent to which I cared about her was thinking she should leave well enough alone and stop pursuing her mad mystery.
In conclusion, this is probably someone’s perfect book, but that person is probably already an 18th c fashion nerd, or even more in need of a marriage-free historical fiction narrative than I am.
The good:
This is a book about a successful single businesswoman, with a complex and fulfilling life, including family and friends, who starts the book single and ends it single. She has complicated feelings about her family, and her relationship to parenthood (she herself is a foundling, reunited with her family later in life), but not only is it not solved through marriage, she never even considers that.
It’s rare to find a book that is *about family and intergenerational complexity*, which follows a single female protagonist, but is not about that protagonist’s marriage or lack thereof. If that’s something you’re looking for, this might be the book for you.
The bad:
Firstly, I was unimpressed with this as a work of historical fiction. It engages pretty closely with certain elements - I don’t know all that much about 18th c fashion, but it seemed to be doing a good job there. Court politics, likewise. Unfortunately, I fell incredibly awry of the whole thing over religious sentiment. A fairly major character is a brimstone protestant vicar, who *sends his sister-in-law to a nunnery to give birth out of wedlock*, and no one, not the vicar, not the woman in question, *no one* comments on the religious difference between them and the nuns. I’m not actually sure what form ‘sending her away’ would have taken for 18th century protestants (no shotgun wedding was considered - I suspect a more logical course of action would have been to magic up a clerical favor-ower to marry the sister-in-law), but even if it involved nuns they ought to have *had opinions about the religious difference*.
Secondly, it sounds petty to say that that ruined the entire book for me, but. Nothing else about the book captivated me, I suppose. I don’t know much about the 18th century clothing trade, I should be easy to captivate with detail - but it all felt mechanical. The prose was flat. By and large I didn’t really care about anyone except the protagonist, and the extent to which I cared about her was thinking she should leave well enough alone and stop pursuing her mad mystery.
In conclusion, this is probably someone’s perfect book, but that person is probably already an 18th c fashion nerd, or even more in need of a marriage-free historical fiction narrative than I am.