So I didn't bother to look up any background on this because by the time I finished the book (forced myself to blitz through the last 40% tonight in one shot to get off my Currently Reading list) but I gather from context that the author, Linda Grant, started a fashion style blog some years ago and this book was later spawned. It seems like she just expanded on some blog posts; sometimes she directly cites posts and comments from her blog.

I was initially intrigued by such writing as this paragraph from the section I was able to preview on Scribd:

-- "The purpose of this book is to advance no theses, to break no ground in the history or theory of fashion, but rather to explore what is already known but rarely thought about by the ordinary mass of humanity who is interested in fashion and might, quite wrongly, feel a little ashamed of this passion. Might fear that they are not going to be taken seriously. That in announcing this preoccupation they will have confessed that women are not really fully grown up; unlike our male counterparts, who have mature and adult preoccupations without which the human race could not survive, such as moving balls from one end of a grassy field to the other with the aid of the human foot."

Splendid, I thought. Sarcastic, too, even better!

I regret the credit I wasted on Scribd for this book now. I accept that the author claimed there was no defining stance on the topic, and given that the topic is fashion, can there really be any firm ground to stand on at all? Yet that is exactly what she tries to do! Ping ponging from how clothing and adornment was a vital part of reestablishing self-identity to Holocaust survivors (agreed) to slamming women who dress unsuitably based on how the people around them (read: the author) react to promoting feminism in the form of being able to wear whatever a woman feels empowered wearing back to deifying the mythical standard of Old Hollywood Glamour which no one is able to achieve in the modern day because the author hasn't been able to, end discussion. The part that irritates me about this flip flopping, which okay, perfectly reasonable to spend 250+ pages rambling about to a paying public if we're sucker enough to buy it, is that her writing voice comes across as so darn condescending and prejudiced.

If I could throw this book across the room, I would. Alas, e-books and the fragility of my electronic devices.

Not to say I didn't find the book entirely devoid of enjoyment. If you can speed read through it, then the sharply written bits are quite funny and you can brush off the rest. The hard part was forcing myself to keep coming back to it to read more after being interrupted.

Emily was afraid of being alone , she lives and works with her dad. When her dad becomes friendly with Tania, Emily doesn’t like it and wants to make her dad end the relationship. Emily doesn’t even realize her relationship is basically over. Dominic isn’t happy and realizes he has been living his life to please his parents not himself. Helen realizes her love for Alec is hopeless. Alec has come to the conclusion he wants more from life and the girl he wants is already taken. Dom who is Emily’s boyfriend is a Professor of history and works under Emily’s dad. Alec wants Emily and wants to get Helen and Dom together so he can go after Emily for himself.

I liked this story for the most part I didn’t like Emily not knowing Tania but didn’t want her father with Tania. I also so don’t like when their is cheating going on in a story I am reading. It did work ok in the story but some of the reason not a higher rating for me. I also felt Emily was being very selfish and immature. But i did still finish the story. I liked the characters for the most part and all the twists and turns they go through.

I received an ARC of this story for an honest review.

Fabulous 5 Friday: Books About Clothes and Style

I’m a sucker for style books. Not books about fashion, per se, but about personal style and the relationships we develop with clothing. Humans are highly visual and clothing is one of the many heuristics we use to make judgments, intentional or not. Anyone who says they don’t care about style or only wear what is comfortable is still making a style choice; it’s an unavoidable part of living in society. Humans value self-expression and we communicate through clothing in conscious and unconscious ways. If you doubt this, just think about how you feel when you go out dressed to the nines versus running to the store in your sweatpants. You feel different, don’t you? Whether one of those experiences is “better” than the other is up to personal preference, but they certainly are different. Personally, I find this sort of clothing-as-language phenomenon fascinating and I like to take some time, usually once or twice a year, to look at my closet and see what I’m saying to the world and what I would like to change. I also just really enjoy clothes.

These books are the “guides” (really more like inspiration) I use when my closet cleaning mood strikes. Each must be taken with a grain of salt; they are almost all written by people who work in the fashion world and are privileged financially and socially, and they tend to have a severe lack of body diversity. But they are all fun and helpful in their own, somewhat limited ways.

The Little Black Book of Style by Nina Garcia

You may know Garcia from her regular stint as a judge on Project Runway. She has been an editor and/or fashion director for several big name fashion magazines, most famously Elle and Marie Claire, so she certainly has her fashion credentials. What I really appreciate about Garcia’s take on the genre is that she is straightforward about the difference between having personal style versus simply following fashion. She may work in the fashion world (and come from a stylish, wealthy background) but she appreciates the little personal touches that make a wardrobe something genuinely expressive. She may namedrop like any fashion insider, but she doesn’t let that overshadow a genuine love for self-expression and self-respect. Plus, the watercolor illustrations by Ruben Toledo are fabulous.

The One Hundred by Nina Garcia

Perhaps this is cheating, but I had to give the second choice to Garcia as well (she’s written 4 books so far). The One Hundred is less about the “how to” and more a fun reference guide for the items that have proven themselves as staples time and time again. She gives advice on what pieces are worth investment versus which ones can be cheap fun while also giving little mini-history and pop culture lessons on various iconic items like trench coats and cashmere sweaters. There are a few chapters that are misses (in my personal opinion) but everyone’s list of “must haves” will vary and she acknowledges that, too. This one is also illustrated by Ruben Toledo.

I Love Your Style by Amanda Brooks

Amanda Brooks, much like Nina Garcia, comes from a pretty well-to-do background and has a lot of connections in the fashion world. Even so, she has a decidedly eclectic sense of style, which she illustrates (literally and figuratively) in this style-manual-cum-memoir. The photographs alone are worth the price of admission, but she has some pretty good advice to give, too. Anyone who has made as many questionable clothing decisions as Brooks has to have something worthwhile to teach. The beginning of the book is devoted to her life as a budding fashionista, while the rest is a sort of reference book for particular “types” of style and how that translates in all sorts of different ways for different people. I love looking at the vintage pictures of people like Cher and Bianca Jagger for inspiration, I just wish there was more body diversity.

The Sartorialist by Scott Schuman

Anyone with even a passing interest in clothes or street style blogs knows of The Sartorialist. While everything in the book can be seen online on the original blog, the book itself is like a little trove of amazing images that you can peruse when the mood strikes or you need a little inspiration. Unlike Garcia and Brooks, Scott Schuman isn’t focused on capturing one vision of personal style, but of celebrating it in all kinds of ways and on all types of people. There may still be some snobbery here and there, but it’s overall a supremely open-ended way to look at beauty and self-expression.

The Thoughful Dresser by Linda Grant

This is a book that looks at the personal ways we are affected by clothes, rather than offering any sort of style advice. “The only thing worse than being skint (poor) is looking skint.” Until I read this line in The Thoughtful Dresser, I had never fully processed the way I think about clothes and social class. We all know that clothing can be used to assess wealth on some level, but we forget that clothing can also allow for a sort of dignity that may be otherwise unavailable to someone who is struggling. Every time someone complains that a “poor” person spent money on new clothes instead of some other necessity, I think about this. Grant looks at clothing as a means to various ends: she looks at a woman “saved” by clothing after surviving a concentration camp, at women who were able to turn shopping into an act of independence, and at the many ways we use clothing as a marker of identity.

... nun die Geschichte aus Kellan Kyles Sicht.

    I'm not even really sure what to say here. I wanted to love this book.....I mean it's a whole book of Kellan Kyle for goodness sake! Honestly the first half of the book was, at times, a struggle for me to get into. It was so hard to wrap my mind around why Kellan even started liking Kiera in the first place. And I know that I am going to sound like a completely heartless wretch here, but seriously, the constant whining was too much for me. Did I feel bad for Kellan, yes, of course I did, but at a certain point all the ceaseless wallowing goes from sad to just plain annoying.

   I did enjoy seeing some scenes from Kellan's point of view. I got a lot better of an understanding of where his head was at with everything that in Thoughtless was kind of mystifying. I really think that if this book would have been cut in about half, and more so just glanced over things a little more, rather than relive every moment, I would have actually liked it a lot better. Will I still continue on with the series when Griffin's book comes out? HELL YES!  But if there are more of the reliving all the things I've already read, that can't be recapped in a novella from a different POV, then those I might just have to skip over.

**Please don't revoke my Kellan Kyle fan club membership!!! JK that's actually probably a legitimate thing, that I am really not in. I really did love the Thoughtless series, even when I hated certain things, or people. I know that might not make sense to those of you that haven't read this yet, but those who have get it.**

     I received a copy of this book from Forever (Grand Central Publishing) via NetGalley in exchange for an honest review