Review: The Grand Design

The Grand Design by Joy Callaway
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I usually love learning about famous people under the guise of history/fiction. I admit that learning about Greenbrier was fascinating -my husband knew more about this resort than I did because of some old-time famous golf tournament! I thought that learning about the famous decorator, Dorothy Draper, would be fascinating too, but it was not. She seems to be or at least was portrayed as a selfish, whiny, argumentative, *itch. I know that women with aspirations back in the early '40 really needed to be assertive, but between the two stories...I found I just did not like Dorothy. I could not connect with her, I could not find any sympathy for her, and the more I learned about her, the less I cared. The dual timeline was frustrating for me. The multiple characters in both timelines were equally frustrating. I'm being frank when I say that this was a disappointing read for me. *ARC supplied by the publisher Harper Muse, the author, and ATTL/Edelweiss.

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SYNOPSIS: "She has one last chance to prove she chose the right course for her life.

In 1908, young Dorothy Tuckerman chafes under the bland, beige traditions of her socialite circles. Only the aristocracy’s annual summer trips to The Greenbrier resort in West Virginia spark her imagination. In this naturally beautiful place, an unexpected romance with an Italian racecar driver gives Dorothy a taste of the passion and adventure she wants. But her family intervenes, sentencing Dorothy to the life she hopes to escape.

Thirty-eight years later, as World War II draws to a close, Dorothy has done everything a woman in the early twentieth century should not: she has divorced her husband—scandalous—and established America’s first interior design firm—shocking. Now, Dorothy returns to The Greenbrier with the assignment to restore it to something even greater than its original glory. With her beloved company’s future hanging in the balance and brimming with daring, unconventional ideas, Dorothy has one more chance to give her dreams wings or succumb to her what society tells her is her inescapable fate."