The Dress Thief

by Natalie Meg Evans

May 29, 2014 · Quercus Books

Buy →

DNF

More Info →

View Book Info Page

This RITA® Reader Challenge 2015 review was written by KNO'Rear. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Best First Book category.

Here is K.N.O'Rear's review:

I wanted to like Natalie Meg Evans’ book, The Dress Thief, I really did, but I simply couldn’t read the last third of the book and as a result it ended up with a DNF grade. However, just because I couldn’t finish the book doesn’t mean it’s a bad book; there were simply too many tropes in it that I personally do not like.

Basically, The Dress Thief is a huge love letter to the old skool epic romances of the 70s and 80s. Evans herself admits on her website that “I grew up reading the classics and those sweeping sagas from writers like Danielle Steele, Colleen McCullough, M.M. Kaye and my favorite, Beatrice Coogan….”  While I haven’t read many books in the sweeping romance genre, I have read reviews on similar books on Smart Bitches, and done a little internet research. Based on that knowledge,The Dress Thief seems to contain many of the genre trademarks.

The story is about Alix Gower, a Jewish girl growing up in Paris on the cusp of WWII. All of Europe is experiencing a terrible depression and doing anything so that they and their families can survive. Alix lives with her paranoid grandmother and works as a telemarker and midnights as a “dress thief,” which basically means she sneaks into fashion shows and uses her near-photographic memories to sketch the dresses she saw and gives them to her employer and suitor number one, a single father named Paul. He then sends the sketches to his contact who sells them to black market designers who copy the unique designs and sells them at a much cheaper price.

Meanwhile, the man who helped Alix’s grandmother and her daughter flee from London to Paris, Jean-Ives, is being blackmailed by some mysterious person who knows about a murder he accidentally committed that was witnessed by Alix’s grandmother and her daughter. Said blackmailer eventually starts targeting Alix because of how much Jean-Ives loves her (as a daughter).

On top of all that, Paul’s contact, Una hires Alix to steal the exclusive fall collection of a famous designer named Javier. In order to commit the theft, she quits her job as a telemarketer and starts working for Javier. The theft becomes a little difficult when Javier takes a genuine interest in Alix’s potential and makes her one of his mannequins (models) and even adds one of her designs to the collection. Of course, the collection is canceled due to a tragic accident that I won’t spoil, but not before Alix gives the designs to Una who of course sells them anyways, despite knowing the collection would be canceled.

Confused yet? This plot summery doesn’t even include all the countless subplots thrown in, like Verrian, who is Alix’s second suitor. He has a tragic backstory that makes him unable to love, let alone marry anyone. Another subplot is Jackass — I mean suitor number three, Serge, who randomly decided that Alix will be his girl, no matter what she says otherwise. This character is what eventually caused me to put the book down, but more on that later, let’s talk about the characters.

Firstly there are way too many of them and the story head hops constantly and not just between the hero and heroine, which annoyed me. As mentioned earlier Alix is the heroine. She started out pretty likable, plucky, and realistic young woman who dreams becoming a famous fashion designer. As mentioned earlier she has a near-photographic memory and has “the eye for fashion” — as more than a few characters mention. As the story goes on though, she just gets more and more passive, which was part of the reason I ended up disliking the story. She complains that she hates being a dress thief, but never does anything to try and get out of stealing. I understand she was doing what she needed to survive, but still she could have tried to get away somehow, beyond half-heartedly warning Una not to sell the canceled designs.

Furthermore, when Serge decides they’re in a relationship she doesn’t like it, but she doesn’t protest either. She’s simply takes it…

Lastly, Alix had to be saved all the damn time, which is also why I didn’t really like her that much.

Speaking of Serge, he is by far the least complex of her three suitors. He’s basically an evil abuser and that’s all there is to his character. Her second suitor, Verrian, is who I wanted her to end up with and I sure she would have eventually. He’s just such a sweet beta hero with Prince Charming tendencies. He saves Alix from the blackmailer twice and never forces anything on her, not even a kiss. That being said he’s only a little more complex that Serge because of his backstory, other that he isn’t developed beyond the beta hero with a dark past archetype, not to mention he leaves to help Spain fight their Civil War that was also going on and to find himself, or something without a word to Alix.

I’m not a fan of the long separation trope and that pretty much was where I decided this book wasn’t for me, but I was still going to power through the story, until I stopped reading, as mentioned above.

Lastly, there’s Paul. If Serge represents complete evil and Verrian represents complete goodness, Paul is the middle ground suitor. He’s a single father who married and widowed young, which conveniently makes him only a little older than Alix. Of all the suitors they’ve known each other the longest and are great friends. The only thing that stops them from getting together is that they don’t want to ruin their friendship and Paul is a coward. The fact that he loves his girls could almost make him likable, but his cowardly tendencies were so bad that I felt that if it were beneficial to him he’d throw his girls, or anyone else under the bus. As a result, I couldn’t like him.

The only secondary characters worth talking about are Jean-Ives and Una. Jean-Ives is a second protagonist and Evans spend an awful lot of time in his head, too much quite honestly since his story and subplots make the novel quite dense and confusing at points. I understand that he’s a necessary character — he’s a huge part of Alix’s backstory, after all, but I don’t think seeing his daughter’s wedding and his horrible wife adding to Alix’s suffering was necessary. He and his wife have an unhappy marriage and since this story is set in the 1930s instead of the Victorian Era, she knows he’s having an affair of some sort and that’s a bad thing, especially when she starts to suspect that the woman he’s having an affair with is Alix. She’s wrong of course — he doesn’t lust after Alix — but that doesn’t stop his wife from finding out and deciding to make Alix’s life even more awful than it already is. I didn’t get too far with that, because she discovers that shortly before I stopped reading.

Una is as close to a big bad as this story gets, but one thing I liked about the story is that Una isn’t vilified completely, unlike Serge. She’s definitely a terrible person, but like everyone else, she’s doing all she can to survive the depression. I still hated her, but I can appreciate her complexity. The rest of the characters range from fun and decently developed (Alix’s grandmother and Javier) to barely one-note characters (Paul’s kids).

In conclusion, I didn’t like this story and couldn’t finish it, but mostly because of personal trope preferences and a line it crossed that I will not. If you are a fan of sweeping romantic epics read it, because I think you will love The Dress Thief. If not you may want to pass on this one.