C-
Genre: Historical: American, Romance
This RITA® Reader Challenge 2016 review was written by Isabelle. This story was nominated for the RITA® in the Long Historical category.
The summary:
As preparations for the 1893 World’s Fair set Chicago and the nation on fire, Louis Tiffany—heir to the exclusive Fifth Avenue jewelry empire—seizes the opportunity to unveil his state-of-the-art, stained glass, mosaic chapel, the likes of which the world has never seen.
But when Louis’s dream is threatened by a glassworkers’ strike months before the Fair opens, he turns to an unforeseen source for help: the female students at the Art Students League of New York. Eager for adventure, the young women pick up their skirts, move to boarding houses, take up steel cutters, and assume new identities as the “Tiffany Girls.”
Tiffany Girl is the heartwarming story of the impetuous Flossie Jayne, a beautiful, budding artist who is handpicked by Louis to help complete the Tiffany chapel. Though excited to live in a boarding house when most women stayed home, she quickly finds the world is less welcoming than anticipated. From a Casanova male, to an unconventional married couple, and a condescending singing master, she takes on a colorful cast of characters to transform the boarding house into a home while racing to complete the Tiffany chapel and make a name for herself in the art world.
As challenges mount, her ambitions become threatened from an unexpected quarter: her own heart. Who will claim victory? Her dreams or the captivating boarder next door?
Here is Isabelle's review:
Reading Tiffany Girl, I discovered pretty quickly that I’m not the audience for this book. This came as an unfortunate surprise. I was promised women with cool jobs, turn-of-the-century New York, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition that anyone who’s read The Devil in White City knows all the (literally) gory details about, plus romance? Yes, please, I love all of those things! Alas, it did not deliver on these premises in the way I was hoping it would. So if this is a book or author dear to you, I apologize for all the shade I’m about to throw.
Florence “Flossie” Jayne, our plucky heroine, often gets accused of being a New Woman, the euphemism for “feminist” that is used in this book. Mostly she just wants to be free of her parents, a hard-working mom who makes couture clothing for the wives of robber barons, and a loser dad who squanders the family’s money gambling. Economic freedom for Flossie means she can devote herself to her education and her art. I dig that kind of ambition. So she moves out and goes to work at the Tiffany glass company as a sorta-scab while the men are striking (women couldn’t be in the unions, after all).
She does at least consider what it means to cross a picket line, and it turns out she really just wants to help Mr. Tiffany realize his dream of completing a stained glass chapel to display at the upcoming fair in Chicago. This character detail left a sour taste in my mouth, because unlike Flossie, I can’t dredge up much sympathy for a talented guy with an influential dad and deep coffers who can’t seem to make his dreams come true without exploiting workers. There is also this strange through line about Flossie discovering her own mediocrity, which felt like a) an odd narrative choice and b) a less than subtle dig at so-called Millennial entitlement. I get that it may be refreshing to not have a heroine who is a perfect cinnamon roll all of the time, but maybe it would feel a little less scolding if it weren’t so ham-fisted in the execution.
Our hero is Reeve Wilder, who comes from a hardscrabble and somewhat nomadic upbringing. He’s just looking for the place where he belongs, which I can certainly sympathize with. He also has mom issues because his died when he was young. Presumably not related to those issues at all, he’s been writing screeds against New Women, who he basically sees as society-destroying, man-hating, sex-crazed harpies (the more things change…) until, guess what, he meets some of them in the boarding house he and Flossie live in and discovers #notallnewwomen. Good for him, I guess? A fundamental tenet of romance is that the hero need to grow as a result of his relationship with the heroine. Still, someone who starts out as a small-minded mansplainer really has a looooong way to go to get me on his side.
Now for the romance itself. If you’re someone who enjoys couple-centric romances, this isn’t the book for you. The hero and heroine don’t actually interact that much. When they do, there’s occasionally some good tension– a good waltz scene in particular! And for the curious, this book is quite chaste, no premarital sex and no explicit sex at all. Irrespective of the spice level, the success of a romance hangs on what sacrifices or transformations the hero and heroine have to make to win their love. Other than coming around to the idea that women are people, Reeve didn’t really have to fight for the love he won in the end.
Okay, so the romance didn’t do it for me, what about the colorful cast of characters? They were not drawn in a particularly memorable way. The portrayal of historical New York? Similarly bland. (Please read The Golem and the Jinni if you want some turn-of-the-century New York gorgeousness.) The World’s Fair itself? Blink and you’ll miss it. The book was thoroughly researched, though, and it does have really interesting illustrations and author’s notes to show for it.
The people Flossie met, plus the city itself, sent her a persistent message: you can’t trust any of the fools around you. She gets scammed, robbed, pinched on the streetcar, assaulted, shunned, passed over at work, satirized, you name it. So much for that concrete jungle where dreams are made of! This could have been a great found-family kind of story for Flossie, but the book resisted that possibility at every turn. The underlying moral seems to be the world is a dangerous place for a woman and the only safe place is in your husband’s house that he purchased from the Sears Catalog and which you will soon fill with a baseball team of children. Dear reader, I recapitulate: I am not the audience for this book.
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What a pity! Although inspirational books are not my thing, I’ve read so many good reviews of this book that I thought it might interest me. Now, reading your review, I see it won’t probably be my thing either.
New Woman is, BTW, a term coined in those times, it’s not exactly a euphemism for ‘feminist’. It was not used to describe a militant feminist or a sufragette, although many of them had those political ideas.
It’s believed that the first one that used this term was the English novelist Sarah Grand in 1894. It just described women that wanted to behave in a little different way – walking alone in the streets, riding bycicles, using comfortable clothes and some studies.
I think one of these figures would have been quite an interesting main character but alas! it looks like this book did not achieve that. So thank you for your review.
I love American historicals, and Deeanne Gist’s always look so amazing. I just am not a fan of inspirationals at all. I would love it if some of my favorite regency author’s could write a few different time periods in different places!
This is a wonderful review. I wouldn’t doubt your instincts on this… books can often be a reflection of the author’s worldview, intentionally or not. It is a shame when that worldview is regressive without reflection.
Dude, the premise sounded good but I don’t think i’d like it at all. So I appreciate the review. Off to find Golem and Jinnii now.
“Irrespective of the spice level, the success of a romance hangs on what sacrifices or transformations the hero and heroine have to make to win their love.”
YES! I have been looking for a way to explain to people who insist romance must have sex that while sex may be useful to the narrative arc depending on the book, it’s not required for a romance to be satisfying. You just nailed it, and in much better words than mine.
I’ve read “Tiffany Girl” and I have to say, I did not find it to suffer from overt religiosity. I normally give “inspirational” romances a wide berth and never got the idea this was meant to be categorized that way. Frankly, I did not find it to actually be a romance at all.
It is a historical novel with romantic elements. It is, I thought, remarkably “true” historically speaking. Unfortunately that means it is also remarkably unsatisfying in terms of the heroine’s arc. She does not succeed, and we are used to books in which our heroines are allowed to succeed. She settles. The guy is nice, he even gives her a studio space, but you know how long that will last once they have a child. It is sadly clear that the heroine’s talent has been overpraised, and her disappointment at realizing she will never “make it” as an artist is compounded by her family’s financial straits. So she settles.
The workshop details were very good, but the World’s Fair – as noted above – was barely there.
The cover painting, however, is a thing of beauty and an unalloyed pleasure.
Actually, chacha1, I find the cover painting odd in the placement of her knee. Either her legs are very oddly proportioned, or she’s a drag queen who is very happy to see us.
@Dorothea – I interpret it as her sitting with her legs crossed under her skirt, but it’s still a little odd.
As an FYI on “New Women”, Mina Harker (nee Murray) of _Dracula_ fame is described in-novel as a New Woman, because she’s taken stenography courses and knows how to work those newfangled typewriters and dictaphones. I believe Lucy twits her gently about it at one point.
I didn’t finish this book, for many of the same reasons you wrote about. Mostly, though, I found the writing very bland. It’s too bad, I feel like there’s so much that would be interesting. I second your recommendation of The Golem and the Jinni!