The Life She Wanted: A Novel

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.