The Disappearance of Astrid Bricard
Natasha Lester’s three-generation romance of the highest levels of fashion design takes a handful of “true stories,” as detailed in her author’s note, and ramps them up into a set of embedded love stories. At the heart of this hefty novel is the passion of designers for the feel and shape of an elegant and alluring garment, shared by Mizza Bricard, her daughter Astrid, and Astrid’s daughter Blythe—all of them strong, determined women attempting to gain agency in a male-dominated, money-hungry domain.
Blythe carries on her shoulders the humiliations experienced by the two generations before her. Struggling as a divorced mother of two small children, she carries her mother’s and grandmother’s insight for fashion. On the other hand, the deprivations of her childhood, her vanished parents, and the crude comments often made about her mother and grandmother echo into her current life. When her ex-husband turns out to be tangled with the one offer that could give her room to follow her dreams and also generate financial stability at last, Blythe finds she’s unable to trust such a future—as well as her own continued love for her ex. “She knows it isn’t just time she lacks. Just like she knows that being creative director of MIZZA and resurrecting the legend of her mother won’t make her happy.”
Lester’s evocation of the sexual freedoms of the 1970s, as evoked through Astrid’s story, comes wrapped in silken bonds of inescapable sexual attraction between woman and man, as well as jealousies among women competing for the same attention. Though the book’s resolution suggests that trauma and deprivation can be brushed aside with the right marriage and more self-assurance, that’s forgivable within a genre that defends love as the strongest answer.
