The Paris Seamstress by Natasha Lester

CW/TW for rape, coercion, child abuse, child murder, and general horribleness of Nazis and WWII.

The Paris Seamstress is told in parallel storylines between two women, Estella and her granddaughter Fabienne. Estella escapes Paris prior to the Nazi invasion, bringing with her a sewing machine and not much else. She arrives in New York having newly learned that she is a dual citizen of France and the US because her father was American – but she knows nothing about her personal history, nor why her mother lied to her about her parentage and nearly everything else.

Fabienne is a museum curator in Australia in the present day focusing on the history of fashion. The book opens with her attending a Met Gala celebrating her grandmother’s work as a designer. The mystery of their family and the dark secrets that have been concealed by Estella and by Estella’s mother are revealed slowly as the story follows both women. Along the way, Estella slowly figures out the foundation of her design business in the 40s, while Fabienne unravels the mystery that begins with her late father’s birth certificate which contains parental names she doesn’t recognize.

There were some wonderful things and some wrenching things about this book, and while I loved some aspects, the overall imbalance of wrenching over wonderful left me depleted and sad when I finished it.

Here is a list.

Wonderful 1: the language about fabric and fashion, and the way the characters who are seamstresses think about what women do, and how clothing makes them feel. Estella’s feelings are often described in terms of fabric or sewing, and it’s a lovely and lyrical underscore to the ways in which design and clothing are fundamental elements to her character.

Wonderful 2: the ways in which fabric, construction of clothing, and the history of the fashion industry weave (sorry) their way through the lives of the characters. There’s a lot of interesting cultural history here, especially as Estella examines the fashion industry when she arrives in New York. She’d earned money in France sketching then selling copies of French designs to American companies. Once she’s in New York, she realizes that much of fashion in the US is directed at very wealthy women. With the war approaching the US, she examines the number of women she lives with at the Barbizon Hotel for Women (which was a real place) who work and need clothing that makes them feel elegant and confident, but that also remains affordable. Estella’s design career follows the evolution of fashion and design into an industry that creates goods which are accessible to more women, not just the wealthy. The individual Estella against the history of fashion made for very fun reading.

Note 1: though some of the tags for this book indicate that there is a romance, it’s not the most prominent part of the story, nor is it the most satisfying. Estella has a long, complicated relationship with a man she first encounters in France, and Fabienne has a very long-distance courtship with a man that’s constantly interrupted by difficulties in their personal lives. While one romance ends happily, it is rather tepid, and the other seemed disappointingly uneven.

And now the things that continue to trouble me after I finished reading.

Wrenching 1: so much rape. So much sexual violence. In the backstory, in the mystery, rape everywhere. Be ye warned. There is so much rape. It’s exhausting, especially because the trauma of reading about it or discovering that it happened is never fully dealt with by the characters at all, so I was left reeling as well. And there is SO MUCH.

Wrenching 2: Estella is a heroine who is realistically flawed, stubborn, resilient, and talented, and I liked reading about her, even when I wanted to hit her with a sewing machine. But surrounding her, there are many characters who exist solely to support her, who don’t get sufficient stories of their own. They appear and disappear as needed, offering support and encouragement, smoothing her way or helping her advance her career, then leaving when the focus needs to return to Estella. I really liked some of these characters, but their overall development and consistency was terribly unbalanced. As interesting as they were, they weren’t served well by the story they were in.

Wrenching 3: some of the scenes involving antagonists and ancillary characters are so unsatisfying in their resolution. Some are utterly unbelievable. This is a hard point to explain because the antagonists are part of the reveal of the many layers of secrets, and some are based on real people. That second element limits their fictional portrayal in a way that’s frustrating by the end.

There are some heinous people, but there is insufficient justice for them – which is believable, unfortunately. One of the dominant themes of this book is how much women’s lives are controlled by men who have money, influence, or both, and the ways in which terrible people get away with dreadful actions is familiar. But when some of those heinous acts are dealt with on the page and characters face one another, the resolution of that showdown is really unsatisfying in a, “Wait, that’s it?” kind of way. The written resolution of sorts is really not enough, not to create catharsis of any kind nor to sufficiently deal with a person who is that terrible.

Speaking of catharsis and resolution, some of the main protagonists’ decisions are incredibly awful and result in tragedies which don’t seem to bother them too much afterward. There’s either too much or too little struggle with grief and remorse. Time and again, characters pine and wonder about the fate of an individual; that person’s fate is revealed at the end in one line, maybe two, and then that pining character doesn’t seem to deal with that grief much at all.

Wrenching 3: by the end of the book, so much horrible, violent family history has been revealed, and so much abuse, assault, and terror has happened, the ending left me feeling maudlin and hopeless. There isn’t enough aftercare, if that makes sense. I wasn’t expecting sunshine and glorious happiness with everything tickety-boo by The End. That would be impossible. But the last third is tragedy, grief, more tragedy, background tragedy, danger, more grief, revelations of rape, and then more of the same, and for me, there was insufficient resolution of all that pain. The happiness of the remaining characters was lovely, but the story remained imbalanced toward insufficiently processed grief and away from recovery and hope.

I finished it, because I wanted to know the final pieces of the mystery (and if you don’t get it at the first reveal, it’s helpfully and linearly explained shortly afterward) and that part of the book hooked me. As frustrated as I was with Estella, I was hopeful that the characters around her would be more developed instead of replaying the same types of scenes over and over. I wanted to know what happened with Fabienne, and I wanted them both to be safe and happy. They were, but by the end, I wasn’t. When characters don’t sufficiently process a trauma on the page, I think I as the reader absorb it more acutely, and that was the case with this book.

Like today, like right now, so many women in this story pay the price for the terrible behavior of men who face no consequences. The elements that contained the history of fashion in the US were fascinating, but the endless sexual violence that is revealed during the course of the novel undermined any enjoyment I had. Instead of being uplifting or inspiring, the book left me feeling crushed and bleak.

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