THE FASHION ORPHANS, a sweet and poignant story of sisterhood that's about malignant motherhood instead

THE FASHION ORPHANS
RANDY SUSAN MEYERS & M.J. ROSE
Blue Box Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$7.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Two estranged sisters find that forgiveness never goes out of style when they inherit their mother’s vintage jackets, purses… and pearls of wisdom

Estranged half-sisters Gabrielle Winslow and Lulu Quattro have only two things in common: mounds of debt and coils of unresolved enmity toward Bette Bradford, their controlling and imperious recently deceased mother.

Gabrielle, the firstborn, was raised in relative luxury on Manhattan’s rarefied Upper East Side. Now, at fifty-five, her life as a Broadway costume designer married to a heralded Broadway producer has exploded in divorce.

Lulu, who spent half her childhood under the tutelage of her working-class Brooklyn grandparents, is a grieving widow at forty-eight. With her two sons grown, her life feels reduced to her work at the Ditmas Park bakery owned by her late husband’s family.

The two sisters arrive for the reading of their mother’s will, expecting to divide a sizable inheritance, pay off their debts, and then again turn their backs on each other.

But to their shock, what they have been left is their mother’s secret walk-in closet jammed with high-end current and vintage designer clothes and accessories— most from Chanel.

Contemplating the scale of their mother’s self-indulgence, the sisters can’t help but wonder if Lauren Weisberger had it wrong: because it seems, in fact, that the devil wore Chanel. But as they being to explore their mother’s collection, meet and fall in love with her group of warm, wonderful friends, and magically find inspiring messages tucked away in her treasures — it seems as though their mother is advising Lulu and Gabrielle from the beyond — helping them rediscover themselves and restore their relationship with each other.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: I have a personal connection to this story, in that this could be my family. My sisters are a lot older than me, and our mother was the same kind of borderline personality that the dead woman was. After our mother's death, there wasn't anything left except stuff...lots and lots of stuff...and there's a long, long history of unkindness, rancor, and just plain nastiness all over our "family." I was very curious to see how things would play out fictionally.

It's not like I wasn't expecting the happily ever after...I was...but I was simultaneously frustrated and amused at how these deeply estranged siblings navigated this emotional passage without either death threats or theft taking place.

What drew me to the read was that sense of familiarity, of fellow feeling, for the characters. It was a fun way to work through my own bad past. And in the end, while I wanted the story to end the way it did, I was...curiously detached. Neither Lulu nor Gabrielle ever cohered to me, never took on the full volume of characterhood. The real character here was their horrible mother! She emerged in all her shallow, self-centered, controlling awfulness. If you've never seen The Little Mermaid, you won't know this reference, but this old baggage out-Ursula'd Ursula!

I was drawn in by the deep Chanel lore on display here, and found myself grateful for the Fire tablet's ability to browse the web. There's a lot I didn't know, and a lot I half-knew, about Chanel, so being able to check references and to see aesthetics I was ignorant about helped me to *get* this read. The sisters "playing dress-up" in Mama's clothes was a hoot. But in the end, that's just what it felt like: Playing a game in which Mama would, in the end, step in to decide who wins. (Or her lawyer, in this case, who must approve any plan for the huge collection of Chanel artifacts to be disposed of.)

So there's me, all irked with "Mother" Bette being her borderline-personality tantrummy self...there's the source of my sour, not-quite-four star rating. I was certainly drawn in by the collaborators' ability to merge their prose into one authorial voice. It shows that they're different people mostly in the hilarious older women who formed Bette's coterie of ladies-who-lunch, and Lulu's adult sons. These very, very different types didn't emerge from one brain! But they each contributed to the sense of rightness and reality that the story definitely has.

The obvious comparables to this story are Sex and the City and The Devil Wears Prada (actually, Author Weisberger, she wore and collected Chanel), but those aren't direct cognates. Bushnell's book and its offshoots are about navigating complications unique to upper-class modern life; Weisberger's bildungsroman takes a greenhorn into adulthood wearing amazing shoes. Here we have what happens when the Bushnell women, now mothers of another Weisberger generation, have to deal with their own mothers' deaths.

It *is* in a tradition, then, but it is *not* something you've read a dozen times already. It's the next step, it's the Bushnell women's ascent to cronehood, it's the education of the adults in the arts of being elders. It works fine. It isn't quite as full-bodied as I expected it to be, since the real main character turns out to be the dead mother; but it was more than worth my time to read. I'll venture to say that it's worth yours, too.