The Keeper of Happy Endings by Barbara Davis (Book Beginnings & Friday 56)

Title: The Keeper of Happy Endings

Author: Barbara Davis 

Publication: 1 October 2021 -- Lake Union Publishing

Format: Kindle eBook via Amazon First Reads

Amazon Description: 

Soline Roussel is well schooled in the business of happy endings. For generations her family has kept an exclusive bridal salon in Paris, where magic is worked with needle and thread. It’s said that the bride who wears a Roussel gown is guaranteed a lifetime of joy. But devastating losses during World War II leave Soline’s world and heart in ruins and her faith in love shaken. She boxes up her memories, stowing them away, along with her broken dreams, determined to forget.

Decades later, while coping with her own tragic loss, aspiring gallery owner Rory Grant leases Soline’s old property and discovers a box containing letters and a vintage wedding dress, never worn. When Rory returns the mementos, an unlikely friendship develops, and eerie parallels in Rory’s and Soline’s lives begin to surface. It’s clear that they were destined to meet—and that Rory may hold the key to righting a forty-year wrong and opening the door to shared healing and, perhaps, a little magic.

Ramble-y Teaserish Stuff

I knew it was going to happen. 

I read the first page and I just knew.

It takes a lot to make me ugly cry over a book. 

Off the top of my head I can count on one hand the ones that have managed to do so in recent years: 

• The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue by VE Schwab
• The Dead in Their Vaulted Arches by Alan Bradley
• The Strange Adventures of H by Sarah Burton
• When We Danced at the End of the Pier by Sandy Taylor

And now The Keeper of Happy Endings.

By the end of the prologue I was already sniffling. 

By the end of the first chapter I was wondering if I should even attempt to read it at work when a guest may interrupt at any time. Few things are worse than ugly crying in front of a hotel guest.

I risked it, though, because I couldn't not read the book once I had started.

By the time I was about half way through I was a mess and needed to take fairly regular decompression breaks from reading or risk my tear ducts drying up or my work not getting done. Every time I took a break, though, I thought about the book and how soon I could get back to it. I missed Rory and Soline and even Esmée and Camilla.

The book jumps around. Sometimes it is Soline's story, and sometimes it is Rory's. Some chapters are set just before World War II, and some in the "present day" mid-1980s (with stops here and there along the way). Soline's chapters are always in the first-person. Rory's are always in the third-person subjective. All of the jumping around could easily make one's head spin, but Davis makes it work.

Both women have faced horrible tragedies and losses. They have more or less given up completely on their dreams and their futures. Dreams and futures, for both, that would have taken them off the paths that their own mothers would have put them on. Mother-daughter relationships can be tricky and Soline and Rory each know this all too well.

For Soline, her mother Esmée was known as The Dress Witch and Soline was to follow in her footsteps -- and the footsteps of generations of Roussels -- sewing charms and spells into wedding gowns that would guarantee a happy ending for the bride.

For more than two hundred years, there has been a Dress Witch, the keeper of our secret and the teacher of our craft. Our gift, though taught, is at its roots hereditary, the title passed from one generation to the next. When the mother lays down her needle, the daughter takes it up. And so goes The Work.

For Rory, it was more about escaping the seeming perfection that was her own mother.

Never a hair out of place, never a faux pas made -- that was Camilla Lowell Grant. The right clothes, the right home, the right art. The right everything, if didn't count the chronically unfaithful husband and the intractable daughter. Still, Camilla bore her burdens admirably. Most of the time.

Camilla waved a hand, clearly ready to change the subject. "Nothing. It doesn't matter now. But for the record, mothers are human too. We've had lives and been disappointed. We bleed like everyone else. But we have responsibilities, duties to fulfill and appearances to maintain. And so we keep moving forward."

Moving forward. It's not an easy concept for Rory -- or for Soline. 

Months after her life is turned upside-down and inside-out, Rory decides to follow her dream by leasing the fire-damaged storefront the was Soline's dress shop -- the one that she herself started when she followed her dream after her own life was turned upside-down and inside-out forty years prior. The two form a remarkable and unbreakable bond through their hurts and their memories as their lives are remarkably similar in spite of the age difference. They also share their hopes and dreams, just when they each thought that there wasn't much of anything left to hope for or dream about. They find ways to move forward. They do so together as kindred spirits.

"We're all a collection of out stories, chérie. Our joys and sorrows. Our loves and losses. That is who we are, a tally of all our agonies and ecstasies. Sometimes the agonies leave a mark, like a bruise on the soul. We do our best to hide them from the world, and from ourselves too. Because we're afraid of being fragile. Of being damaged. That's what makes us kindred spirits, Rory -- our bruises."

I could go on and on about the nuances and intricacies of The Keeper of Happy Endings, but this is really one that you need to read for yourself in order to understand. It's about breakdowns and breakthroughs. It's about holding on and letting go. It's about healing and strength and love and la magie. It's about faith. Faith in what was and what could be. Faith in others and, most of all, faith in oneself.

Without faith, even our work is doomed to fail. Faith is everything.

Just like the charms that Soline would sew into her dresses, and the complex layers of depth and wonder in Rory's textile seascapes, Barbara Davis has created something undeniably special with her words. Even through the blur of the ugly tears, it's beautiful.

As always, Friday 56 (share a blurb from the 56th page or 56% mark) is hosted at Freda's Voice & Book Beginnings (share the first few sentences) is at Rose City Reader.