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Overview
Since her parents’ mysterious deaths many years ago, scientist Cora Sparks has spent her days in the safety of her university lab or at her grandmother Etta’s dress shop. Tucked away on a winding Cambridge street, Etta’s charming tiny store appears quite ordinary to passersby, but the colorfully vibrant racks of beaded silks, delicate laces, and jewel-toned velvets hold bewitching secrets: With just a few stitches from Etta’s needle, these gorgeous gowns have the power to free a woman’s deepest desires.
Etta’s dearest wish is to work her magic on her granddaughter. Cora’s studious, unromantic eye has overlooked Walt, the shy bookseller who has been in love with her forever. Determined not to allow Cora to miss her chance at happiness, Etta sews a tiny stitch into Walt’s collar, hoping to give him the courage to confess his feelings to Cora. But magic spells—like true love—can go awry. After Walt is spurred into action, Etta realizes she’s set in motion a series of astonishing events that will transform Cora’s life in extraordinary and unexpected ways.
Praise for The Dress Shop of Dreams
“Reminiscent of Love Actually and P.S. I Love You, this cute little book is recommended to readers who want to be charmed by the possibilities of love.”—LibraryReads (Top Ten Pick)
“[Menna] van Praag has a deliciously innate capability to weave the totality of characters of The Dress Shop of Dreams into a compelling tale. Each character, from Cambridge to Oxford, augments and refines these dynamics. Ultimately, van Praag cracks the code that deciphers magical fate when it comes to couture and the complexities of love.”—New York Journal of Books
“[A] brightly colored fabulist confection . . . sure to delight those looking for a little fairy dust in their romance.”—Kirkus Reviews
“The Dress Shop of Dreams is a delightful blending of many love stories plus a tale of murder and suspense. Van Praag has a knack for balancing a large cast of engaging characters, and her references to beloved authors and historic scientists are enjoyable touchstones between doses of mystery and magic.”—Booklist
“The Dress Shop of Dreams is a light, sweet and shimmering confection, well worth a read.”—BookLoons
“Bighearted, beautiful, and brushed with magic, this novel celebrates life’s moments of joy, possibility, and transformation. Menna van Praag’s writing is bright with sparkles and lovely grace notes.”—Susan Wiggs, bestselling author of The Beekeeper’s Ball
“The Dress Shop of Dreams is a dream come true for lovers of romantic tales with a twist of fantasy. Utterly enchanting! Menna van Praag’s imaginative, endearing characters will stay with you long after you close the book.”—Mary Alice Monroe, New York Times bestselling author of The Summer Wind
“Dresses, dreams, magic, and mystery swirl in this enchanting novel. The Dress Shop of Dreams is the book to read before turning off your bedside light.”—Nancy Thayer, New York Times bestselling author of Nantucket Sisters
Look for special features inside. Join the Random House Reader’s Circle for author chats and more.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804178983 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 12/30/2014 |
| Pages: | 336 |
| Sales rank: | 677,676 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
When ordinary shoppers stumble into the little dress shop, they usually leave without buying anything. Nothing seems to fit or suit them very well. The music clouds their chatter and the shimmering silk walls hurt their eyes. After a few minutes they stumble out onto the street again, muttering to their friends about fashion and wondering why they ever bothered to step inside in the first place. But when a different kind of shopper discovers the shop, they find that opening its little blue door is the very best decision they’ve ever made. These are the women who aren’t really looking for the perfect cocktail dress, the jeans that’ll lengthen their legs or the skirt that will slim their silhouette. No, these women are looking for much more than that; they are looking for a lost piece of themselves. Which is exactly what Etta Sparks can give them.
When such a woman absently ruffles through the racks of expectant dresses, casting furtive glances toward the counter, Etta sits pretending not to notice, until the time is right. Although she isn’t actually psychic (being able to see only what the dresses show her) Etta has many gifts, and one of them is knowing when someone is ripe. She can see when a shy woman is on the edge of feeling brave. And then she steps forward.
“That would look beautiful on you,” she’ll suggest gently. “Why don’t you try it on?”
They always shake their heads at first, of course. But Etta can see the desire in their fingertips, the tiny flicker of hope in their eyes. So she chats about anything: the weather, the music, the sweetness of strawberries, the latest film, a particular book, the sensuality of silk . . . Then, when the woman is ready, Etta picks out a dress—in their favorite color, one that will make their eyes sparkle, their hair shine and their skin glow. And, now that she knows their greatest wish, Etta makes them a promise. A promise she knows to be true.
“Wear this dress and you’ll find what you’re missing: confidence, courage, power, love, beauty, magnificence . . .” Etta says, while they regard her rather skeptically. “You will. I promise. Wear this dress and it will transform your life.”
Etta doesn’t mention that it might be a bit of a bumpy ride, at least at first. When a woman needs courage, for example, life might throw a few things at her to draw it out. When a woman needs to love herself, she might be lonely while life leaves her without external hearts to hide in. Other things are simpler, like beauty and magnificence, since as soon as a woman slips the dress over her head and stares into the mirror, she instantly feels more beautiful and magnificent than she’s ever felt in her life.
Fortunately there is nothing that, with a little nip, tuck and the stitching of a special little star, Etta’s dresses can’t provide. For these are dresses that unlock the wisdom and wishes of women’s hearts, dresses that help them to heal themselves and, eventually, attain their deepest desires.
Etta loves to watch when these women step out of the changing room, their faces lit with delight and disbelief.
“My goodness,” they say. “But it’s so . . . I look so, so . . .”
“Beautiful.” Etta nods. “Yes, you do.” And she watches them, swallowing a happy sigh and everything else she wants to say but really shouldn’t.
“You just need a nip here,” she says, taking a threaded needle from her pocket and making six quick stitches in the shape of a star, “a tiny tuck here. And voilà!” Etta steps back, a knowing smile on her lips and a sparkle in her eye. “You are perfect.”
It happens the same way every time. The woman usually stands in front of the mirror for a while, turning this way and that, checking to be certain it isn’t an illusion. And, when she is at last sure it’s real, a blissful smile spreads into her cheeks and flushes through her whole body. In the mirror she sees herself as she truly is: beautiful, powerful, able to do anything. And she sees that the thing she wants most of all, the thing that seemed so impossible when she first stepped into the little dress shop, is really so possible, so close, that she could reach out and touch it.
“Yes,” Etta says then, “as easy as pie. Speaking of which, the bookshop on the corner does the most delicious cherry pie. You really should try some.”
The woman nods then, still slightly stunned, and agrees, saying that pie sounds like a perfect idea. So she stumbles out of the shop in a daze, new dress tucked tightly in her arms, and wanders down All Saints’ Passage to the bookshop. There, she has the best piece of cherry pie she’s ever eaten and leaves with a stack of books that will make the transformation complete.
Cora blinks. She yawns and stretches, then rubs her eyes and gazes up at the ceiling. 564 fleurs-de-lis gaze back down at her. As her body wakes, she could swear faint echoes of jazz drift away and fireworks still sound in the distance. It’s that dream again. The one so vivid it feels more real to her than reality. The one she’s been having nearly every night of her life. The only one she remembers every morning when she wakes up.
In her dream Cora is standing at her bedroom window, tiny hands splayed on either side of her freckled nose against the glass, watching fireworks explode, scattering light like fistfuls of stars. Down in the garden a hundred lanterns hang above a hundred heads, luminous rainbows of silk bobbing along to the jazz. Champagne corks and trumpets blow into the air amid claps and cheers. A beautiful black woman sings on stage, her voice as bright as the feathers in her hair.
Cora sees her parents standing close to the singer, sharing a glass of bubbling, sparkling water. They sway together, her father’s arm around her mother’s waist, her beautiful head tucked against his chest. Cora wants to join them. She wants to sing, dance, clap and cheer. She wants to freeze-frame the fireworks and count each burst of light. She wants to open her mouth and swallow the sparks and stars as they fall from the sky. But Cora is too young for the party. She was sent to bed hours ago and really should be asleep. Instead she watches the celebrations, listening to the laughter and the jazz tapping on her window, until the last firework explodes and the moon fades away in the milky dawn.
Cora would swear it was a memory, but she understands it can’t be. Her parents died twenty years ago today, on her fifth birthday, and she only knows their matching black hair and green eyes, their tall gangly figures and faraway stares, from photographs. There was never a party, and certainly not such an extravagant affair, of this Cora is certain. Her parents were prominent academics at New College, Oxford, who never frequented frivolous events. Maggie and Robert Carraway spent most of their days, and many of their nights, in the biochemistry department. When they weren’t cross-pollinating plants, discovering new species or generally trying to save the planet, Cora’s parents were teaching her the basics of complex tissues, encouraging her to experiment on sunflowers or taking her on tours of English woodlands, European mountains and African deserts. They usually forgot birthdays, anniversaries and the like. They would have forgotten Christmas, too, if the luminous trees and light displays throughout the city hadn’t reminded them. Not that they were neglectful, far from it. They simply lived in their own world—a world of cells and organisms, of ecosystems and genetics, of research and theories, but a world in which their daughter was at the very center. The Carraways took Cora everywhere. They kept a cot in the biochemistry lab for when they worked late. She took trips to European conferences. She ate all her meals in the university canteen. She played with papers, pencils and chemical equations. A year before they died they published a letter in The Times calling for the government to fund research into sustainable foods capable of growing in barren climates to feed and sustain starving communities. The letter hinted that they were focused on creating such foods, but since all their papers burned in the fire that killed them, Cora never knew for certain.
All of this early history has been recounted to Cora by her grandmother, since Cora doesn’t remember a day of it, having suppressed the memory of her life with her parents along with their deaths. As a child Cora asked questions about them all the time and Etta gave her carefully selected stories in return. Nowadays Cora tries not to ask too often, not to focus on impossible fantasy and lost hope, though of course she can’t stop the dreams. But the one thing she holds true to is that letter (Etta’s copy, framed on Cora’s bedroom wall) for it reminds her of why she does what she does, spending every day in the lab trying to fulfill her parents’ legacy, to do a great thing that would make them proud.
Cora slides out of bed and crosses her room, counting the floorboards as she steps across her tiny flat on Silver Street, provided virtually rent-free by the university in return for her devotion to their biology department. And so, for forty hours in the lab and twenty hours teaching each week, Cora has fifty-three square meters in the center of Cambridge in which to sleep and eat. Not that she does much of either there. The flat is simple and sparse. The floors are wooden, the walls white. She owns no TV, no stereo, no ornaments. She never buys flowers or bowls of fruit. If Cora ever had visitors, they’d think she had only just moved in. If there was a fire the first, and only, thing she’d bother saving is her laptop. No paintings or photographs adorn the walls, no books are on the shelves. Everything she needs for work she has at her rooms in Trinity College. She survives on sandwiches and snacks from coffee shops at lunchtime and vending machines late into the night while she’s scouring over plant plasma and peptides.
The only bright and beautiful thing in Cora’s flat are her pajamas: Indian shot silk, the color of a sunset, sprinkled with 34 pink peonies and 69 blue morpho butterflies. She trundles into the kitchen now, opens the fridge and pulls out a bag of coffee beans. She weighs the bag in her hand—1,233 beans, approximately. These, along with a week-old loaf of bread, are the only edibles in her flat.
Cora switches on the kettle, marking the seconds until it boils. Whenever Cora is worried—about life, science, loneliness—counting soothes her. She’s always had an extraordinary ability to count, to just know facts and figures at a glance. Of course, to her it’s perfectly ordinary, since she’s always been able to do it. But she understands that other people can’t and that those same people might find her strange, so she tries to do it only in private. While sixty-seven seconds tick by, Cora imagines her day. In an hour she’ll be at the lab. Three hours and fifty-five minutes after that she’ll eat lunch. Or, more likely, forget to eat lunch. Six hours and twenty minutes after that she’ll nod at her colleagues when they leave for the day. Three hours and forty-seven minutes later she’ll leave. Then she’ll come home and go to bed. Three days a week she adjusts the schedule for an evening visit to a bookshop. Within that she fits in her teaching commitments and visits to Etta. Otherwise, her days all follow the same pattern, yesterday, today and tomorrow.
Then, as she pours the hot water into the French press, Cora remembers the date. March 14. Which means that today is a bit different; today she’s having dinner with her grandmother. Today is her birthday.
Reading Group Guide
A Conversation with Menna van Praag
Random House Reader’s Circle: How did you become a published writer?
Menna van Praag: Just before I turned thirty, I wrote a little book called Men, Money, and Chocolate. I’d written numerous (unpublished) novels before that, but I had a special feeling about this one. It wasn’t a great work of literature, just a little fable, but it was true. I believed in it. I still didn’t fully believe in myself as a writer, but I believed in this book. So, full of confidence and excitement, I submitted it for publication . . . but it was rejected. So I self-published. I went all over London, Oxford and Cambridge, bribing independent bookstores with my homemade flapjacks and begging them to sell my book. Eventually people started reading it and loving it. About a year later, when I’d sold nearly a thousand copies, I submitted it again and this time it was picked up. It was subsequently translated into twenty-six languages. That was just the beginning. . . .
RHRC: Do you have a writing routine?
MVP: I don’t have a particular routine but write whenever I can. Before my son was born (three years ago), I’d often write for ten hours a day. Nowadays, if I get two hours in a row I consider myself lucky! I can write anywhere, but my favorite place is at my desk on a sunny day. I have a window that looks out onto my garden. Whenever I’m stuck for words, I go for a walk, and the next sentence will come to me soon enough. I adore notebooks and often scribble ideas, sentences and paragraphs down in them, but when it comes to writing the story, I always go to the computer.
RHRC: Where did the idea for The Dress Shop of Dreams come from?
MVP: I saw a TV spot about Cuban cigar rollers who pay a percentage of their wages to a reader who will read them stories while they work. They then name some of the cigars after their favorite tales. I thought how it would be if the reader had a magical voice, and I fell instantly in love with the character of the Night Reader.
RHRC: What do you love most about writing?
MVP: While I fall absolutely in love with my characters, losing myself in their stories (these are often as much a surprise to me as to anyone), most of all I love the words: the way a beautiful sentence feels on your tongue, the delightful surprise of a startling and lovely simile or metaphor. I simply love words.
RHRC: What are some of your favorite books and authors?
MVP: Magical realism has always been my favourite genre. I like to think there’s more to reality than our five senses show us. My favorite author, above all others, is probably Alice Hoffman. I love the magic in her tales, along with the acute realism of the worlds she creates. Other favorite magical-realism authors include: Isabel Allende, Laura Esquivel, Sarah Addison Allen and Barbara O’Neal. Other favorite authors, who don’t write specifically in that genre, include: Erica Bauermeister, Maggie O’Farrell, Ann Patchett, Tracy Chevalier, Carey Wallace, Anita Shreve, Kate Morton, Anne Lamott, Anne Tyler, Neil Gaiman and Sue Monk Kidd. I’ve just finished The Age of Desire by Jennie Fields, which I found to be a beautiful book. I’m always on the look out for new authors, so if we share similar tastes and you have any recommendations, please get in touch!
RHRC: Did reading a particular book inspire you to want to be a writer?
MVP: As a child I was a typical bookworm, reading everything I could get my hands on—aren’t all writers? The first book that had a significant impact on me was The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley. It opened up the idea of magic hiding within the mundane. The book that made me want to be a writer was The House of the Spirits by Isabel Allende. I read it as a young teenager, and it was so startling, so magnificent that it ignited within me a desire to write something like that. I didn’t believe I could (that came much, much later), but I desperately wanted to and was determined to try.
RHRC: What advice would you offer an aspiring writer?
MVP: Write all the time—as often as you can—read nearly as much as you write. And, if you want to get published, simply never, ever, ever, give up. It’s simply a matter of deciding how much you want it (it can take years, decades even—it took me just over a decade), so determination is the most valuable trait you can employ. Oh, and if you’re just starting out and need a little help with inspiration, self-belief and all that, read The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. I read that book at age nineteen—I longed to be a writer, but I couldn’t write—when I started reading it, suddenly, there was light and possibility and hope.
RHRC: Do you ever feel stuck?
MVP: I used to feel stuck all the time. In my twenties I was full of self-doubt and could barely finish a first chapter. But, following years of attending inspirational seminars and writing workshops, I’m no longer a perfectionist, which, of course, makes finishing a book a lot easier! I now simply write because I love to express myself. I no longer care that it’s not Shakespeare. I don’t suffer from stuckness anymore, but if things aren’t flowing as they should be, then I stop for a while and go for a walk, read a book or watch a film instead. I take an inspirational break, and when I return to my desk, the words are usually there waiting for me.
RHRC: What do you hope to accomplish with your writing?
MVP: I once got an email that actually made me cry. It was from a woman who worked in an office job that she hated. She went to a bookshop over lunch, bought Men, Money, and Chocolate and read it under her desk that afternoon. Then she replicated the main character, Maya, and booked a fortnight off work. She wanted to be a singer, so she arranged time in a recording studio, made an album, and now she gigs all over the country. It’s incredible that something that I wrote actually helped someone transform her life. It’s a glorious thing to feel that you’re somehow being a little piece of goodness in the world; it’s a gift.
RHRC: What next?
MVP: I’ve just started running writing workshops in person and online. Teaching was a dream I had a long time ago, but it’s taken me until now to have the courage to do it! It’s a process I find extremely inspiring, both professionally and personally.
I love witnessing my students becoming better writers while we’re working together, and I’m certainly becoming a better writer myself in the process, which is a lovely, unexpected bonus.
My next book, The Witches of Cambridge, is about a secret society of women (and one man) who are all professors at the university and all witches. It’s the most fantastical book I’ve written so far, and I’m absolutely loving it. I’m also musing on an idea I had (about ten years ago) for a children’s book. I might be nearly ready to start writing that now. . . .
1. Etta’s dresses give their wearers a magic push to go after their dreams. Have you ever had an item of clothing that especially inspired you to take action that you might not have otherwise? Or perhaps someone or something gave you a push to do something that you might not have initiated on your own?
2. Why do you think Etta’s magic doesn’t work on her?
3. Cora’s father tells her the chemical formula for love is “One proton of faith, three electrons of humility, a neutron of compassion and a bond of honesty.” Do you agree? Would you add anything to this equation?
4. Dylan’s letters bring comfort to many lonely fans of the Night Reader. Do you think that justifies his duplicity?
5. Another possible title for this book was The Night Reader, after Walt and his special secret. Does it change the story for you if you think of Walt as the main character? Which of the characters do you most identify with?
6. On page 142, Cora tells her grandmother that “all the great leaps are made when a scientist thinks of something she can’t yet prove, then dedicates her life to trying.” All of the characters in this book have to make leaps of faith to get something they want. What are some examples?
7. Do you think Etta made a mistake when she decided not to tell Sebastian about their daughter? Would you have made the same decision? Are secrets inherently wrong or sometimes justifiable?
8. Should Henry have fought for Francesca even when she told him she didn’t love him anymore? Do you think she was right to send him away?
9. At the start of the novel, Cora protects herself from pain by focusing on numbers and lab work. But all of the novel’s characters have ways of hiding from their feelings. What do you think these characters are afraid of? Do you ever notice yourself or others around you strategically avoiding difficult truths?
10. As he reads, Walt notices similarities between himself and the characters in his books: he identifies with Emma in Madame Bovary, Marianne from Sense and Sensibility, and Cyrano de Bergerac. Are there other great literary figures you would compare him to? What about Etta? Cora?
11. On page 37, Etta thinks: “It’s a great shame . . . that the heart cannot feel joy without also feeling pain, that it cannot know love without also knowing loss.” Do you agree that it’s true that we cannot love without also suffering?