Inspiring. A fantastic story. ( )

The Life She Wanted by Anita Abriel sweeps readers back to 1926 in Hyde Park, New York where Pandora Carmichael dreams of becoming a fashion designer. The story has a good premise. The 1920s is one of my favorite time periods. I can understand Pandora’s love of fashion. Times were changing and so were fashions. There are parts of The Life She Wanted that I liked and other parts that I did not like. The author is a descriptive writer which does allow readers to visualize the scenes. It also makes the story move at a slower pace. The characters lacked depth. They needed to be fleshed out and brought to life. I never got a sense of Pandora’s personality. Her emotions never seemed real. Pandora is not a likeable character. Some of her thoughts and reasoning made me cringe. There are a number of characters, but they are all superficial. Pandora’s friend, Virginia was a progressive woman. She had no intention of following in her parents’ footsteps. I like the path that she forged. The Life She Wanted was more of a romance than a book about a woman overcoming her circumstances and making a name for herself in the fashion world. The story played out in an expected manner. I easily predicted early on how the story would play out. The author touched on some adult themes in the story especially for the time period. Unfortunately, she barely scratched the surface. There was repetition of key details (I got it the first time and I did not need it repeated twenty times). The ending was rushed compared to the rest of the story. I also felt the story lacked the lingo that would have been used in the 1920s. The Life She Wanted was just okay for me. The Life She Wanted is the berries with a fat cat sheik, a fashionista tomato, a handcuff for a bim, hinky behavior, a fella in the jug, a Jane in a jam, and a plan for rags. ( )

Pandora Carmichael is the daughter of a once-famous tennis player who now teaches the sport to the well-to-do in the Hudson Valley in 1920s New York. She grows up around opulence, but she possesses none of it. A teenager at the beginning of the book, she explores dating relationships, but struggles to achieve exactly what she wants out of life. She has a deep passion for fashion design, but in pre-World War II America, a college education is more reserved for the elite, which is definitely not her.

The persistent quality of her dreams push her on past more “practical” routes, such as secretarial school or factory work. Her heart is periodically broken but quickly resurrected. She makes pragmatic compromises but never compromises her integrity and truthfulness to herself. Like many of us, she ends up achieving her dreams – “the life she wanted” – only in a more circuitous way than she would have designed as a teenager. She learns a lot about life and her place in life along the way.

Although set in the past, this book’s historical moorings are not essential to its character. It’s centrally a coming-of-age tale of love and life. The cultural backdrop of late-1920s and early-1930s America plays a role in the plot, but this book contains much more fiction than history. That may disappoint some who look for deeper historical insights in their historical fiction.

That said, it definitely is a solid, light-hearted, romantic story with a strong feminine protagonist in an era where feminism was harder to live by. Themes that current-day society wrestles with are seen in prior, silenced settings. In framing social squabbles of today, Anita Abriel’s novel remembers where society has evolved from to see where we must go. Looking forward, it reminds us that love is humanity’s universal motif. ( )