Review: The Fashion Orphans

The Fashion Orphans by Randy Susan Meyers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Wow! This was a heck of a ride. Almost too angsty, maybe even depressing for me, but I'm glad I stuck with this book. There are bits of this story that will stretch the line of credibility to the thinnest, but the characters make giving up your disbelief worthwhile.

To explain this story would be taking the chance that I'm going to give something up, but I'll give it a try. This is a story of two sisters who have had different lives with their mother while growing up. They also had very different lives as adults, and to be sure, these are women, not young adults.

Their mother had died, leaving them a legacy, one that they have to figure out together what to do with. Oh, and did I tell you that these sisters were estranged?

So this story ends up being about sisters learning to love again, each other, and the men in their lives. It is a story of coming to terms with what life has handed them. It is a story of multi-generations learning to love each other.

Plus, it was a remarkable story of Coco Chanel.


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Synopsis: "Two estranged sisters find that forgiveness never goes out of style when they inherit their mother’s vintage jackets, purses… and pearls of wisdom

Estranged half-sisters Gabrielle Winslow and Lulu Quattro have only two things in common: mounds of debt and coils of unresolved enmity toward Bette Bradford, their controlling and imperious recently deceased mother.

Gabrielle, the firstborn, was raised in relative luxury on Manhattan’s rarefied Upper East Side. Now, at fifty-five, her life as a Broadway costume designer married to a heralded Broadway producer has exploded in divorce.

Lulu, who spent half her childhood under the tutelage of her working-class Brooklyn grandparents, is a grieving widow at forty-eight. With her two sons grown, her life feels reduced to her work at the Ditmas Park bakery owned by her late husband’s family.

The two sisters arrive for the reading of their mother’s will, expecting to divide a sizable inheritance, pay off their debts, and then again turn their backs on each other.

But to their shock, what they have been left is their mother’s secret walk-in closet jammed with high-end current and vintage designer clothes and accessories— most from Chanel.

Contemplating the scale of their mother’s self-indulgence, the sisters can’t help but wonder if Lauren Weisberger had it wrong: because it seems, in fact, that the devil wore Chanel. But as they being to explore their mother’s collection, meet and fall in love with her group of warm, wonderful friends, and magically find inspiring messages tucked away in her treasures — it seems as though their mother is advising Lulu and Gabrielle from the beyond — helping them rediscover themselves and restore their relationship with each other."