The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights
In 1924, Bea moves to New York City with a teenaged ward named Alice, a scandalous past, and decades of secrets. Alice, a daughter in all but name to Bea, is a talented seamstress and designer who has felt lost since the death of her mother and sister. Both as vocation and refuge, the two open an avant-garde dress shop in quiet Prospect Heights. When newlywed Catherine Berrill steps into Bea and Alice’s shop, she’s cradling sorrow close to her chest. Unable to conceive a dearly wanted baby, she finds solace in decorating her home with art, patterns, textiles, and color and is drawn to the bohemian lushness of the dress shop. But Bea has more than a welcoming shop to offer Catherine and a job to offer Alice; she also has a shared secret that changes the relationship between all three women.
Zeldis’s novel is plush and inviting. Between the colors, textures, and drapes of Bea and Alice’s dressmaking materials and of Catherine’s interior design, the reader feels vividly there, touching and experiencing. The characters are all unconventional women yearning for conventional things—love, belonging, success. In different ways, Bea, Alice, and Catherine are chasing an ideal, yearning for a picture-perfect family that doesn’t exist. In the search, though, they find unexpected relationships, ones built on shared experiences and on redefinitions of womanhood. This is a story about mothers, daughters, and sisters—those born to us and those we choose—of women actively creating families rather than waiting for them to appear. A heartfelt read.
