Pam G. read a book she really enjoyed, written by the author who wrote one of Pam’s favorite comfort reads. Here’s Pam’s review.

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I was totally tickled when Dictatorship of the Dress showed up on my Kindle recently. Jessica Topper’s Louder than Love ( A | K | G | AB ) is one of my favorite comfort reads and has created a sly hunger for rock romance in this old broad. The blurb of Dictatorship described something quite different from the earlier novel, but Topper’s writerly qualities promised a rewarding read. Happily, I was not disappointed.

Dictatorship is the story of chance meeting that changes two lives. Laney and Noah first encounter one another at LaGuardia in a haze of mutual disapproval rooted in false, appearance-based assumptions. Laney is heading for Hawaii with her mother’s wedding dress; Noah, to Vegas for his bachelor party. Laney sees Noah as a typical suit, enslaved by his technology and cushioned by executive privilege. She thinks he’s heading for a male-bondathon with fellow corporate drones in Vegas and doesn’t realize that he is the bridegroom. Noah can hardly even see Laney at first, because he is so blinded by the wedding dress that evokes all the problems with his own approaching nuptials. He imagines her as another spoiled, demanding, detail-obsessed bride. Most of the action takes place as Noah and Laney are repeatedly thrown into one another’s company, first on the plane, then during missed connections due to bad weather in Chicago. Much of the reader’s pleasure stems from getting to know the two protagonists as they learn each other over a couple of stressful days, uncovering what each hides and understanding their choices—both wise and not so much.

Laney’s voice opens the novel:

 

Really, LaGuardia? One of the busiest airports in the country, and you couldn’t come up with a better name? You could’ve skipped C altogether, like some hotels do when they omit the unlucky thirteenth floor. You know, Terminals A, B, D, E …

I’m sure there would still be some clueless tourists in life, scratching their heads, consulting their maps. Pointing and asking. Whatever happened to Terminal C? Where’s Terminal C?

“It’s in my bones, Laney Jane.” I could still hear Allen’s throaty whisper and feel his long, strong drummer’s fingers tangle through my hair. “It’s not going away this time.”

 

I confess that I had to read this twice to actually understand what she was saying. I’m not sure if it was the absence of the actual word “cancer,” or the odd use of the word “life.”  (Was it a typo, meant to be “line” or just a bit of obscure philosophizing?)  However, in spite of the rocky start, I was left with a lot of information. I now knew that there was sorrow in this young woman’s life, that she’d been involved with a musician, that he’d had cancer, and, most importantly, that she used humor to deal with grief and frustration. 

Laney and Noah take turns telling their story. Alternating first person point of view augmented by emails, text messages, and a couple of invitations give the story a sense of immediacy. In addition to recounting ongoing events, Laney recalls her past relationship with Allen as well as conflicts with her controlling mother in brief vignettes scattered through her account.

Noah also considers the past that entangled him with the Bridezilla from hell. These flashbacks are very well integrated into the narrative. I found this an effective method for blending multiple story lines while avoiding the dreaded infodump. Laney and Noah have distinctive voices and the author manages their character development very well with this technique. 

When Noah and Laney first interact, the result is a snarkfest extraordinaire, but they gradually discover that appearances are not everything and that they share more than adjoining seats in first class. It takes longer for them to clear up the biggest misunderstandings between them, namely, Laney’s belief that Noah is en route to a friend’s bachelor party and Noah’s belief that Laney is a prospective bride. This unintended deceit complicates their growing attraction more than the other false impressions, but, once resolved, leads to some remarkably honest exchanges as they gradually reveal themselves to one another. Another misunderstanding drives the action as well. Airline personnel assume first, that Laney is a bride and later that Laney and Noah are a couple. They allow this misperception to stand for the sake of convenience and undeserved benefits during their travel mishaps, though eventually the deception makes their problems harder to sort out. Misperceptions and the need for truth underlie much of the story’s action and create the conflict necessary to make a love story interesting within such a brief timespan.

I really liked Noah and Laney. Each has major personal issues to sort out, and attraction becomes a catalyst for necessary change. Laney is still working through her grief for Allen, and his dead presence creates an unbearably sad triangle. Laney’s shaky self-esteem and less-than-happy life choices are another major thread in the net of her past. Noah, on the other hand, is trying to deal with his seemingly inevitable future tied to Sloane, the emasculation queen, and her father, the boss-in-law-to-be. Noah’s youth is refreshingly not tragic, but is relevant to his current dilemma. Initially, it seems that simple ambition has driven Noah into his engagement, but as the story unwinds, Noah’s motivations become clearer and more complex.

 The slow reveal of each player’s backstory is woven into their current interactions. And those interactions are hot and often hilarious as each revels in the other’s secret geekitude. Okay, as a former Marvel artist, Laney’s completely out of the geek closet, so no secrets there, but it turns out that Noah’s matchy-matchy ensemble hides a computer programming prodigy with strong nerd cred. A shared addiction to Marvel comics is only the first indicator of potential compatibility. As the story unfolds, Laney and Noah find more and more common ground despite their initial hostility and the attraction neither of them wants. Sharing a hotel room overnight, they discover a mutual enthusiasm for Japanese monster movies. 

“Giant Monsters All-Out Attack!”

“No way! That’s my favorite Godzilla movie of all time.” Noah hopped onto the bed and perched cross-legged like a little kid. “Let me guess. You’re too old-school to like this one.”

“What can I say? I’m a purist. Although”—I balanced my drink on the flat wood of the footboard before sprawling belly down—“any movie with Mothra in it is okay in my book.” Propping myself up on my elbows, I watched the citizens of Japan flee in silent terror.

“But Mothra dies in this one, remember? Godzilla kills her with his atomic breath.”

“He must’ve been eating Slim Jims,” I teased, sneaking a look back at him.

 

Laney and Noah talk a lot in this novel, and conversation–whether sarcastic, bantering, argumentative, or soul-baring–is the means by which they get to know each other and we get to know them. Flashbacks and internal monologues are the emotional underpinnings of the book, but dialogue makes these characters and their relationship bright and lively and immediate. Through conversation, we learn that Laney and Noah are good for each other in ways that go way beyond the physical—though physical awareness is always present between them. Laney responds with support and good advice when Noah is embarrassed to reveal his best-selling virtual fart app. 

“Now you know why I never went to any of my class reunions. Can you imagine; I’d spend the entire evening fending off ‘dude, pull my finger’ jokes from all the jocks,” I muttered.

“Matter-Eater Lad. Codpiece. Arm-Fall-Off-Boy. Granted, those were all DC. But Marvel has had some doozies, too. Asbestos Lady. Whizzer. Squirrel Girl.”

“Your point?”

“Every successful enterprise has a few prototypes they aren’t proud of. And there is no accounting for taste when it comes to the buyers’ market. That’s all,” she said simply. She set my phone down on my thigh and wasn’t quick in taking her hand away.

“Just keep doing what you love.”

 

Ironically, Laney should have given that last bit of advice to herself as well, since Laney’s apparent slackerhood is rooted in some serious emotional problems. There’s Laney’s sacrifice of a much loved career; there’s her mom, controlling, undermining, and dissing everything that Laney loves; there’s her relationship with Allen that, revealed bit by bit, was far from idyllic. Allen was no sweet refugee from the Lurlene-iverse; he was a first class destructive asshole at times. (Actually, his assholery is a plus for me, not because it makes him a villain or an expendable character, but because it makes him real. Dead boyfriends should not default to sainthood. ) Both Laney and Noah are much kinder to each other than they are to themselves.

Noah, though he has painted himself into a virtual corner with his engagement, does not suffer from horrible childhood trauma. He is lonely and sometimes a little socially awkward but not broken. Beneath the veneer of a go-getter businessman is a man with high personal standards who takes responsibility for everyone’s happiness but his own. Though I liked both the hero and heroine, I found Noah much more interesting and subtle because his problems are not mired in melodrama. Noah needs to man up in order to resolve his issues, and I liked that a tragic history wasn’t a prerequisite for hard decision making. Ordinary choices in ordinary lives can sometimes require the same courage needed to overcome tragedy.

 Although the characters of Noah and Laney dominate the novel, this story is more than an elaborate pas de deux. Characterization is one of Jessica Topper’s strengths, and each of the secondary characters is beautifully delineated. (There is one exception in the latter part of the novel whose function seems to be to spackle a major crack in the plot, but more of that later.) None of the characters get the page time that Noah and Laney do, but each contributes something valuable to the hero and heroine’s experience and to the thematic underpinnings of the novel. Over and over, the author uses encounters among these characters to point out the contrast between the insane brouhaha surrounding a fashionable wedding and the fundamentals of a sound marriage. At one point, in an attempt to rescue her mother’s dress, Laney and Noah appeal to the guardians of their impounded car with an account of their faux proposal by a non-functioning fountain.

“I had wanted everything to be just perfect.”

“And it was,” I said softly. “You couldn’t have planned it better. It’s supposed to be ‘for better and for worse,’ anyway, right? In sickness and in health…” Now the tears were really rolling, as I was thinking about Allen. And my parents. “Marriage isn’t just about sticking around for the pretty light show and water features. You’ve got to be there for the dry season, too.”

 

Ironically, Laney speaks truth in the midst of a lie. The contrast between the sincerity of this statement and the fact that it describes a complete fiction demonstrates the nifty layering of false and true. It also kind of sums up the multiple conflicts between what is done to please and impress others and what is done for oneself.

Although there are so many things I loved about this novel, there are a couple of elements that kept me from giving it an A grade. The first one is an uneasy feeling that sometimes hits you after you finish a book that you otherwise really enjoyed. Or maybe it just hits me—a sense that all the loose ends are tied up too neatly, the plot is just a little too symmetrical, the relationships a little too perfectly balanced. While I need and want a satisfying resolution to the central relationship in a romance, I see no reason for a story to skip merrily through the final chapters of the book going “Wheeee!” and strewing happy endings at everybody. Although there is a tiny bit of ambiguity at the very end to offset the excess tidiness, I was still left feeling a mite itchy from all the happy.

My discomfort with the novel’s over-neatness is a mostly subjective judgment, and wouldn’t bother me much, but my biggest disconnect with Dictatorship has to do with one of the major elements of the story. There is no way to be specific without whizzing spoilers all over the place, but one of Laney’s major problems is simply reversed at the end of the book. I can accept that an individual’s perceptions are not necessarily accurate or objective, but when a character repeatedly claims that something is true, backs it up with concrete examples, and offers no inadvertent reveals to show that her perception might be slanted, you expect that problem to be dealt with honestly. What you don’t expect is to have a secondary character show up and deny or explain away the issue that has driven a major part of the heroine’s behavior. I love a misleading first person narration, especially if the misdirection is deliberate and clever. This kind of narration creates a puzzle to be deciphered and adds fascinating layers to a character’s psyche. However, simply having a character say black black black on every page and then having someone else shout WHITE at the end just makes the first character seem like a dork or a liar. And when said character is your heroine, that’s just not ok. 

Dictatorship of the Dress seems to have some stylistic characteristics of New Adult fiction—if I correctly understand what that is—except that the main characters have a tad too much grown up backstory to really be considered “new.” I mention this only to indicate who might be the expected audience for this novel. Overall, the story is very cleverly constructed–both funny and touching, its lightness revealing surprising depths. In spite of my caveats, Dictatorship of the Dress was well worth reading, and I look forward to future entries in the series.