Nine Women, One Dress by Jane L. Rosen

Book Description:

"Natalie is a Bloomingdale's salesgirl mooning over her lawyer ex-boyfriend who's engaged to someone else after just two months. Felicia has been quietly in love with her boss for seventeen years and has one night to finally make the feeling mutual. Andie is a private detective who specializes in gathering evidence on cheating husbands—a skill she unfortunately learned from her own life—and lands a case that may restore her faith in true love. For these three women, as well as half a dozen others in sparkling supporting roles—a young model fresh from rural Alabama, a diva Hollywood star making her Broadway debut, an overachieving, unemployed Brown grad who starts faking a fabulous life on social media, to name just a few—everything is about to change, thanks to the dress of the season, the perfect little black number everyone wants to get their hands on . . ."

  Does the woman make the dress, or does the dress make the woman? I think that there is really a lot of truth to this cliché and we are encouraged through this book to understand that while clothing makes for great outward armor, we really can’t be more than we are deep down inside.  Yes, a lovely fitting dress can do wonders for our ego and even go a long way to giving us some courage at times.  But if we are a horrible person inside, no matter what kind of clothing we wear, we will still be that same horrible person.

I have never read a book written in an almost vignette style like this has.  The first third of the book is spent by exploring a bit of the lives that this dress is going to touch.  From the very first person to wear this dress in the prologue, to the pattern maker who built this miraculous dress, we are introduced in very short chapters to everyone.

The second third goes into more detail about these lives and some of these couples find themselves in some very funny situations.

The last third looks at these couples in even more depth and bring to conclusion that everyone will get what they either desire or deserve.  I understand that some readers are a bit out off by the brevity of the character building, but I just didn’t see it that way.  I think this book would have been a big letdown for me if it had been written differently.  Yes, this is a fairly short book coming in at less than 300 pages and for sure I was so entranced by everyone’s lives that I may have wanted more – but what we did get was like having the perfect meal and you still had room for dessert without getting sick!

This book even had something for every age bracket.  It is so difficult for me to find satisfying romances for my age group, but the author managed to hit everything from New Adults to the middle aged and she did it splendidly!