The Pink Suit

April 28, 2014
Kelby cleverly combines historical fact with fiction in this engaging tale of a talented seamstress and her quest to find love and happiness. Kate is an Irish immigrant living in 1960s New York and working as a seamstress at Chez Ninon, a Park Avenue dress shop. As a devout Catholic, Kate starts her days with mass and works tirelessly at the dress shop before returning home late in the day. The highlight of her work involves the shop's most important client, the Wife, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. And Kate's primary focus is creating the Wife's pink suit, a Chanel creation copied by Chez Ninon to fulfill the Wife's every expectation. Facing the dilemma of many working women, Kate seeks to find balance between her increasingly demanding job and her budding relationship with Patrick Harris, a local butcher. The disparity between her possible future as a butcher's wife or a principal partner in a dress shop is not lost on Kate, and throughout she struggles with the promise of love or fortune. Kelby excels brilliantly at imbuing the reader with the ability to see the beauty of fabric and design through Kate's eyes, as well as to personally feel the depths of emotion in Kate's difficult life choices.

April 15, 2014
Irish immigrant and seamstress Kate's connection to First Lady Jackie Kennedy is one fraught with the nuances of public image, crushing sadness, and unexpectedly scattered life trajectories in Kelby's literary reworking of the true story behind the famous pink suit worn on the day in 1963 when a nation's dream died. Kate's job working for couturier to the stars Chez Ninon is simple yet excruciating. She must imagine every formal dinner and every debutante ball as if she lived them herself. While she labors unseen for the thousands of hours she spends ensuring every tiny stitch is correct, Kate's seemingly mundane life entwines with the lives of the rich and famous whose clothing she helps create, which leads to emotions and events she never could have foreseen. Woven thematically throughout is the concept that the story of the pink suit was no longer about beauty or forgiveness. It was about strength. Subtly written despite the forceful historical significance at the story's heart, this is a graceful telling of the behind-the-scenes lives and realities involved in every monumental event of history.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)