By: Kathleen TessaroHmmm.
Hmmmmmmmmm.
Elegance is funny...yet...it's not a book I would read again.
Let's start with a summary. Elegance is the story of Louise, a woman in her thirties who is tired of being the wife who never has sex with her husband. In a desperate attempt to add some "pizazz" back into her life in any way, shape, or form, Louise picks up a copy of Elegance: A Complete Guide for Every Woman Who Wants to Be Well and Properly Dressed on All Occasions at a secondhand bookstore. By following this A to Z guide on how to be elegant and fashionable, Louise hopes to be able to love herself more so that her husband will in return. Instead, her plan backfires and causes her even more marital problems, leaving Louise with more changes and decisions to make in her life than she ever expected she'd have to deal with at her age.
Before I go into my "why this novel wasn't for me" spiel, I do have to note that the author's use of excerpts from Genevieve Antoine Dariaux's Elegance are a nice touch. This actual guide to elegance was published back in the 1960s, and had it not been for Tessaro's Elegance, I never would have known such a thing existed. So this does add something extra to the novel--it makes it a little more unique, I suppose.
Now it's a well-written novel and I do like the humor in it. I'll be very honest here--I was about to strangle this character Louise every page I turned. She's an annoying narrator because she's like that girl who, no matter what everyone else in the room is talking about and no matter what subject is being discussed, is all about "me me me me me." In this novel, Louise is so fixated on what people think of her and who likes her and who doesn't, yet whenever anyone thinks negatively of her it's because she did something to cause it. I had a hard time getting into a novel where the character creates all her own problems and expects pity from the readers on her behalf.
So what I'm saying is: good novel, but I wish it would have been written in the third person.
