The Dress Thief

by Natalie Meg Evans

May 29, 2014 · Quercus Books

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

Here is Mindy's review:

TRIGGER WARNING: abuse, date rape

Alix Gower dreams of being a couture fashion designer, but those dreams take money she doesn’t have. In the meantime she makes a little extra money by selling sketches of designer clothes to middlemen who export them to be made as cheap knockoffs. Then she gets offered a staggering job—steal an entire collection of clothes. The money will be enough for her to take care of her grandmother and for her friend Paul to afford doctors for his little sisters.

Let me start off by saying that I am coming at this book from about thirty years of reading mysteries and only about three years of reading romances.  So I am still feeling my way around what the expectations and limitations of the genre are.  That said, I feel like this is not actually a romance novel.  And despite the blurb’s hints, it doesn’t work as a mystery novel either. As a historical novel about a poor but talented young woman trying to break into the fashion business in 1930s France, this is perfectly fine.  But as a romance novel, well…I just don’t buy their Happily Ever After together, and not just because she’s Jewish in Paris in 1938.

Oh, yes, our heroine, Alix, is Jewish. The book makes sure to point this out frequently, usually by having a bad guy cast ugly anti-Semitic slurs (the good guys all mutter darkly about disliking that Hitler fellow). Occasionally Alix’s grandmother, Mémé, will murmur a Yiddish phrase. They don’t ever, though, meet with other Jewish people, go to synagogue, celebrate any Jewish holidays, keep kosher, or well, anything else. I realize this is not billed as an inspirational book, but considering the time period, it’d be nice if we knew a LITTLE bit about how Alix feels about her Jewish heritage. I mean, I don’t want to say that you can’t have a Jewish heroine unless her religion is the point of the story, but the lack of any thoughts from Alix herself makes me worry that the author did not think about how our heroine being Jewish would affect the book other than to allow us to have a foreshadowing of the upcoming war. (Her religion also seems like it should be KIND OF important since

I actually like Alix.  She has had all of the people around her keep secrets from her, for “her own good.” She was raised by her Mémé after her parents both died when she was a child. Her grandfather, the artist Alfred Lutzman, was killed by thieves before his promising career could come to fruition. Or at least, that’s what her grandmother has always told her. The Comte de Charembourg is an old family friend who has looked after Alix and her grandmother ever since Alix’s father saved his life in the war. Or at least, that’s what he’s always told her. Alix is now beginning to wonder if everything everyone always told her is actually true…

Things I also like: I really like the behind the scenes look at the not-so-glamorous life of dress design. All the physical labor of cutting and sewing and individually tailoring clothes, and the hours (and repeated failures) of work trying to put an idea into physical form. I wish, wish, wish we had illustrations of some of the dresses, particularly Oro! There is a brief discussion of fashion and designers in the extra materials at the end of the book, but I could have happily read more.

And I find it a brave choice to make our heroine a thief.  That’s something that could easily make us dislike her, but Alix is just trying to do the best she can for those around her. There are no good, easy choices when you are poor and unprivileged.  I also like that this book made me think about the “dress thieves” of the current day, who give us our knock-off designer bags and shoes.

I HATE the “mystery” in this book. So:

Even today, there’s no way the Comte would realistically fear going to jail for this. But in the book he decides to cover up his crime by blaming it on thieves, which somehow, even though there is no proof of anything, leaves him open to blackmail. The big mystery is: Who is the blackmailer? This person takes huge sums of money, threatens the Comte’s daughters, and attacks Alix to show how serious he is. The Comte has told no one about his secret crime, and neither, she swears, has Mémé. The only other person now alive who knows anything is a bed-ridden old woman back in Alsace, the Comte’s former housekeeper. So how could anyone know anything? Of course,

AND, just to put the icing on the cake of shitty non-mystery-ness, not only do they only discover who the blackmailer is by overhearing him make a blackmail call on Alix’s phone (because Evil is Dumb), at the end, once they expose this dude, this dude who threatened Alix with a knife and

So why is this not a romance novel?

Well, Alix spends longer dating another guy than she does our hero, Verrain. Verrain is a field reporter for an English newspaper, who has spent the last year covering the fighting in Spain, and barely escaped the country alive. They first “meet” when she breaks the rules at her brief stint as a phone operator to put through his life or death call.  They flirt a little more when he helps her escape after she gets locked inside the sewing house.  Then he conveniently shows up in the nick of time to rescue her from being attacked, and she finally agrees to a date with him.  After only a couple of dates, and him walking her home from work several nights, Verrain gets a call that Spanish friends of his are in trouble. He flies out to them, and when he learns that his friend was killed in the Guernica bombing, decides IMMEDIATELY to sneak back into Spain and fight the Fascists for a year and a half.

Could he have waited long enough to help his friend’s family get settled in Paris, to have packed a bag, or to have talked to Alix before he left (particularly since he left the morning after her grandmother went into a coma)? Could he have sent her letters from the front to assure her he was alive and deepen their romance? Yes, but then we wouldn’t have an excuse for misunderstandings and jealousy and dating scumbags.

That’s right, she spends most of the time Verrain is off fighting dating a complete jerk named Serge, one of the few actual French people in the book. Serge is … nice to her Mémé, who’s in a coma by this time, and… that’s about it, really, as far as why she might date him. I dunno, he likes to spend lots of money on her and makes it really, really clear that he wants her, but mainly he’s just a huge, lying, abusive jerk who pressures her to have sex when she doesn’t want to, then blames her for his shitty sex skills and date rapes her. So yay for that?

I can’t help but wonder, though, if the real reason for Alix to date Serge is so that Verrain appears better in contrast. I mean, this is the dude who decides that just mentioning his assignment in Spain covering the civil war is too deep for this woman he barely knows: “Was he speaking of things that were over her head? Almost certainly.”

On their first date, Alix tells him a little about herself and her family, as you do.  Verrain, claiming that his journalistic instincts just COMPEL him to pry, decides to investigate her family history and whether Alix’s father REALLY saved the Comte’s life. Of course, he does all this WITHOUT asking Alix whether she wants him to do so.  When he finds out that Alix’s grandfather was murdered, his first thought is “I wonder if she knows that?” IT’S HER GRANDFATHER, I THINK SHE MIGHT KNOW THIS. But since she didn’t open with that fact on their first date, he decided that she must be ignorant of her own life. She literally tells him at one point, “You’re trying to explain me to myself.” But he never really apologizes for this or for anything else. And meanwhile, Verrain doesn’t ever want to tell Alix anything about himself or his family. He never mentions his former wife until Alix notices the tan line from his wedding ring, and then refuses to tell her anything (even the wife’s name), attempts to distract Alix with a kiss and a request to go back to his hotel, and then gets mad when she refuses.

I guess my biggest complaint is that I just don’t buy a Happily Ever After for these two.  Not just because she’s Jewish (ish), and he’s a war reporter in France in 1938.  His entire family is against the idea of him dating a Jewish woman, and Mémé doesn’t seem like she’d be that thrilled at her granddaughter marrying a gentile. They don’t ever talk about her time while he was gone or her experiences with Serge (other than for Verrain to accuse her of not wanting to have sex with him because Serge was such an awesome lover—which, buddy, SO MUCH NO) so Verrain has no clue that she was raped, emotionally abused, possibly addicted to alcohol and drugs, and maybe still has PTSD from when she was attacked at knifepoint. His history of making spur-of-the-moment decisions to leave for warzones and then never write home seems like a disaster in the making. And the whole climax of the book isn’t them overcoming obstacles to get together (I mean, the main obstacle was that he just wasn’t THERE for most of the book), but Alix overcoming obstacles to launch her own fashion line.

I just feel like a book where the hero disappears for most of the novel and nobody in text acknowledges that the heroine was raped or provides her with any sort of aftercare for it is not a romance novel.  If I were to grade this as a straight up historical novel, I would probably rate this higher, but as it is, I’m just not buying it.