In her second novel, Jill G. Hall, author of The Black Velvet Coat, brings readers another dual tale of two dynamic women from two very different eras searching for fulfillment.
San Francisco artist Anne McFarland has been distracted by a cross-country romance with sexy Sergio and has veered from her creative path. While visiting him in New York, she buys a pair of rhinestone shoes in an antique … antique shop that spark her imagination and lead her on a quest to learn more about the shoes¿ original owner.
Almost ninety years earlier, Clair Deveraux, a sheltered 1929 New York debutante, tries to reside within the bounds of polite society and please her father. But when she meets Winnie, a carefree Macy¿s shop girl, Clair is lured into the steamy side of Manhattan¿a place filled with speakeasies, flappers, and the beat of ¿that devil music¿¿and her true desires explode wide open. Secrets and lies heap up until her father loses everything in the stock market crash and Clair becomes entangled in the burlesque world in an effort to save her family and herself.
Ultimately, both Anne and Clair¿two very different women living in very different eras¿attain true fulfillment . . . with some help from their silver shoes.
more
Pleasant engaging read
Good read, you’ll enjoy it
I enjoy books that switch between in the present and the past in parallel stories. However, this book is very simply written and the plot is fairly predictable. The characters are not well drawn. It wasn’t awful, but not really worth the time I gave it.
Just ok, not as good as black velvet coat
Loved how the story switched forward and back in time as the stories of the owners of the shoes progressed. I liked the ending. The descriptions of 1920s era clothes were so vivid. An entertaining story!
This book kept my interest, but it’s certainly not the most well-written book I’ve ever read. I thought that the historical characters were much more interesting than the current-time people, and the main character (Anne?) was pretty clueless about her love life. If I were a teenager, I probably would have liked the book a lot more than I did.
Good story line between two generations of women
Favorite Quotes:
We were from the South, and Ma had been fickle. Had five husbands… We called her the black widow. She’d always say, ‘Honey, they just keep on dying.’ At least she married Daddy for love. The others she said she married out of habit.”
“Always smile like dis.” Varinska demonstrated a blasé expression with a small relaxed smile and cool eyes. “Face say: No care in vorld.” Varinska lit a cigarette, stuck it in her ivory holder, and took a drag. “Rough up! Find tender spot, they poke till you break. Show me zat smile until sinks in.”
My Review:
Back in the day of Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King, I was an early card-carrying feminist, as such, I don’t often read historical fiction due to the poor manner in which women fared during history, and alas, such was the case with one of the timelines in this book. Yet Ms. Hall’s alluring style managed to quickly pull me into this tooth-gnashing tale of dual timelines and hold me captive, despite my irritation and annoyance with the restrictive patriarchal conditions of 1929. I was fully invested and curiously held in place by the writing quality and intriguing storylines even though I wanted to give the female characters in both timelines a sharp smack and a pinch or ten. I was fully exasperated with both for their dithering and weak spinal columns. Although, in her defense, 1929 was a desperately different age and Clair’s obnoxious father had been unforgivably conniving and controlling. I was intrigued by the premise and quite curious to learn Clair’s fate as well those of her friends, and in unraveling the near ninety-year path of the shoes. My favorite characters, by far, were the quirky and colorful burlesque players of Varinska and Winnie, as of course, I tend to favor the sassier broads 😉