"Impactful story about grace and love."

The Grace Kelly Dress

Posted: January 21, 2020

THE GRACE KELLY DRESS is an innocuous title to a surprising impactful story spanning many years and evolving around brides and their wedding gowns. Grace Kelly was an American actress who met a prince and became a princess. You can’t get any more romantic than that. So at the heart of THE GRACE KELLY DRESS is romance, brides, grooms, and their friends and family. But it would be so shortsighted for my review to trivialize a very well written look at some of societies and histories life-altering events.

THE GRACE KELLY DRESS centers on three amazing women. Rose the Paris seamstress in 1958. Joannie in 1982 who now in 2020 is the mother of Roxy the bride to be. There are lots of secrets hidden in the Grace Kelly dress – yes I am speaking of the actual dress which is the central character of this amazing book. Not really the one that Grace Kelly herself wore but the one that was fashioned after the original.

Note there were many replications of the original dress. But none could totally replicate it because of the secrets it held. In THE GRACE KELLY DRESS we travel through three generations of a family of women to uncover, discover those secrets. Each discovery is more moving than the next. The Grace Kelly dress in this story has been altered in some manner in each generation and now is in the hands of the third generation. There are many little clues – sparse as they are – that totally click once you arrive at the end of this amazing tale.

The reader’s reaction tells it all. I laughed and kind of gasped with the big reveal. Brenda Janowitz was just brilliant in how she managed so deftly to keep certain details just out of reach. But candidly you are not aware of this at all. At least not until the end. And that’s when it all clicked into place like a well designed and constructed jigsaw puzzle.

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THE GRACE KELLY DRESS is truly a work of art. Many references to items of clothing, accessories, and gifts are told through the remarks of characters like Rose as she embarks in an impossible journey as the protégé for a well-known dressmaker whose claim to fame was the magnificent copies of the original Grace Kelly dress. I have purposely been brief and obscure in my review of THE GRACE KELLY DRESS. In would be unconscionable for me to ruin even one moment of this beautiful story told with great care by Brenda Janowitz. THE GRACE KELLY DRESS is coming out in March of 2020. Make sure to put in on your must-read list.

Book Summary

Two years after Grace Kelly’s royal wedding, her iconic dress is still all the rage in Paris—and one replica, and the secrets it carries, will inspire three generations of women to forge their own paths in life and in love.

Paris, 1958: Rose, a seamstress at a fashionable atelier, has been entrusted with sewing a Grace Kelly—look-alike gown for a wealthy bride-to-be. But when, against better judgment, she finds herself falling in love with the bride’s handsome brother, Rose must make an impossible choice, one that could put all she’s worked for at risk: love, security and of course, the dress.

Sixty years later, tech CEO Rachel, who goes by the childhood nickname “Rocky,” has inherited the dress for her upcoming wedding in New York City. But there’s just one problem: Rocky doesn’t want to wear it. A family heirloom dating back to the 1950s, the dress just isn’t her. Rocky knows this admission will break her mother Joan’s heart. But what she doesn’t know is why Joan insists on the dress—or the heartbreaking secret that changed her mother’s life decades before, as she herself prepared to wear it.

As the lives of these three women come together in surprising ways, the revelation of the dress’s history collides with long-buried family heartaches. And in the lead-up to Rocky’s wedding, they’ll have to confront the past before they can embrace the beautiful possibilities of the future.