THE DRESS IN THE WINDOW
Sofia Grant
Releasing July 25, 2017
William Morrow
A perfect debut novel is like a
perfect dress—it’s a “must have” and when you “try it on” it fits perfectly. In
this richly patterned story of sisterhood, ambition, and reinvention Sofia
Grant has created a story just right for fans of Vintage and The
Dress Shop of Dreams.
World War II has ended and American women are shedding their old clothes for the gorgeous new styles. Voluminous layers of taffeta and tulle, wasp waists, and beautiful color—all so welcome after years of sensible styles and strict rationing.
World War II has ended and American women are shedding their old clothes for the gorgeous new styles. Voluminous layers of taffeta and tulle, wasp waists, and beautiful color—all so welcome after years of sensible styles and strict rationing.
Jeanne
Brink and her sister Peggy both had to weather every tragedy the war had to
offer—Peggy now a widowed mother, Jeanne without the fiancé she’d counted on,
both living with Peggy’s mother-in-law in a grim mill town. But despite
their grey pasts they long for a bright future—Jeanne by creating stunning
dresses for her clients with the help of her sister Peggy’s brilliant sketches.
Together,
they combine forces to create amazing fashions and a more prosperous life than
they’d ever dreamed of before the war. But sisterly love can sometimes turn
into sibling jealousy. Always playing second fiddle to her sister, Peggy yearns
to make her own mark. But as they soon discover, the future is never without
its surprises, ones that have the potential to make—or break—their dreams.
Excerpt
#2: Peggy
It
was well past time to turn out the light and get some sleep, but Peggy didn’t
set the square black Conté crayon down. She took a dainty sip of the bitter,
cold coffee left over from the morning—yesterday morning, to be accurate, since
it was nearly one-thirty—and made a bold, broad stroke down a fresh piece of newsprint.
The piece of wood she’d rigged as an easel—taken from a cabinet face from a
building being torn down around the corner—shifted on the bolster on which
Peggy had propped it. Too bad they didn’t know any carpenters who might make
her a real easel, Peggy thought grimly. Too bad they didn’t know any useful men
at all.
On her little mattress not three
feet away, Tommie shifted and rolled, her rosette lips pursed. She was a
restless sleeper, as she had been a restless baby—she’d
come
into the world uneasy, as though she knew already that she’d be denied a
father, denied the perfect charmed life that Peggy had promised her many months
earlier, when she’d first made her presence known on a prodigious wave of
nausea, harbinger of the difficult pregnancy to come.
No, nothing about Tommie was easy,
and sharing a room with her—and yes, Peggy knew she was lucky to have a room at
all, with her sister making up a bed each night in the freezing attic—was a
daily torment.
Another curving black stroke of the
crayon, to meet the first. In those two lines were the suggestion of the back,
the shoulders, the curve of the hip. Peggy glanced at the latest issue of Vogue,
open to a spread titled “The New Blouse-and-Skirt Formula,” featuring
full-circle skirts nipped in tight over balloon-sleeved blouses. The first wave
of outrage over Dior’s new look seemed to have abated, silenced, perhaps, by
the unstoppable tide of women hungry for a bit of glamour. Peggy could
sympathize. The wartime fashions, made severe and scant by textile regulations
dictated by the War Production Board—had looked all right on angular, thin
women like her sister. But on curvy Peggy, they looked downright ridiculous.
She sketched soft, feathery strokes
to suggest a full skirt like the one in the Vogue layout. Underneath the
skirt, there would be structured layers of tulle to give it shape, but her
drawing would only show the fanciful outline, like a bell, with satin pumps
peeping from the bottom. Peggy could wear such a skirt—if she had anywhere to
go. She had retained her small waist even after Tommie’s birth, and her bosom
remained high and generous. She was still making do with her corset from two
years ago, but if she could afford one of the new French-waisted ones, with the
tabs that could be cinched tightly . .
Sofia
Grant has the heart of a homemaker, the curiosity of a
cat, and the keen eye of a scout. She works from an urban aerie in Oakland,
California.
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