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The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available

"I couldn't cook but I could sew. It would have been better the other way around." Trapped in Kansas at the turn of the twentieth century, Nell Plat is seventeen, unhappily married, and the mother of two baby girls. No reality could be further from her secret dreams of glamour and excitement, dreams that will tempt her to do the unthinkable and run away to the glittering wonderland of Los Angeles and the burgeoning motion picture industry.

Lucky for Nell, her experience as a seamstress to the ladies of her Kansas town translates beautifully to work as a costumer to Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties. She renames herself Madame Annelle, and builds a new life for herself that looks so much more like the one she had always imagined. But a knock on the door threatens to rip apart the seams of her own carefully constructed costume, and Nell is forced to confront the legacy of her abandonment and deception. Can she rework the delicate fabric of her life?

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 12, 2008
      Unfortunately for Nell Plat, the heroine of Erin McGraw's immersive fifth book (after The Good Life
      ), she is a whiz with a needle, but a failure in the kitchen. While she makes a name for herself sewing dresses in early 20th-century Grant Station, Kans., her lack of kitchen prowess is crippling to her marriage, prompting her to leave her husband and two daughters for Hollywood, where with the help of a French grammar book, she becomes Madame Annelle, modiste to the fine ladies of Pasadena. She marries oilman George Curran, and has another daughter, Mary. Just as she realizes her dream, cutting fabric alongside an established and very esteemed seamstress, her past arrives on her doorstep in the form of her two grown daughters, flappers who call themselves Lisette and Aimée in an attempt at the sophistication they hope will land them in the movies. Nell claims them as her sisters, but the lie only delays the unraveling of her California dream. Inspired by her grandmother's story, McGraw captures the lonely rigor of life on the plains and the invigorating lure of reinvention.

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  • English

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