Customer Reviews

Love in the Time of Taffeta

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Photographer Iley Gilbert feels depressed as recent decisions she made turned out bad for her career. Needing to make some money, she accepts a job as a prom assistant during the prom season. Her married boss William is a hunk and though she knows better she cannot resist the handsome William and soon they have an affair.

Iley knows the tryst with William is a nowhere street and needs to end it, but she cannot bring herself to do so. As the prom season continues Iley finds herself drawn to a bad girl waif who appears at each prom they shoot. She decides to help the teen, but in doing so Iley begins to help herself starting with ending her affair and finding her lost photographic muse. She even has hopes to find a true love, single that is, as the spiraling downward cycle seems ended.

As Iley makes one dumb decision after another, fans after awhile will hiss her as no one should be that hedonistically pathetic. Still in spite of readers unable to empathize with her needs, she is a fascinating character who, the out of character ending aside, seems unable to stop herself as she dives head first into one mistake after another. Eugenie Olson paints a picture of a woman who is her own worst enemy.

Harriet Klausner

I liked this book. I felt the character of Iley was well done and I could relate to a lot of her issues. Who among us hasn't felt like we aren't going anywhere in our career path? Who hasn't had that feeling of "How the hell did I get here from all those dreams I had for myself?" I also feel that Iley's decisions around her trysts with William were understandable. People make those kinds of ill advised decisions constantly. Love and/or lust makes you do stupid, stupid things.

On the negative side, the book had several typos throughout and in some cases, major errors. For example, in the beginning of the book, William's car is a Volkswagon. Later, it changes to a Volvo, but this was not simply a change in cars because the author describes Iley thinking about her first meeting with William where she heard the music coming from his Volvo. She first described the car as a Volkswagon.

She also made spelling errors such as the restaurant where Erin meets her mother. At first, it's Number Nine Park and then it's Number 9 Park. There are several places where sentences are incomplete because words like "of" are left off. Shoddy editing work tends to turn me off a novel. Generally, this is the editor and not the author who is to blame for this kind of thing, but I would suggest this book be edited again and re-released.

I normally do not write reviews, but thought that I should with this novel. The pace was very slow, the characters unlikeable, and ultimately the story line predictible. I will not read any more titles from this author.

I learned of "Love in the Time of Taffeta" through a book review in BUST magazine and decided to check it out from the public library. I finished the book in one night. I've since read Eugenie Olson's other two books and out of the three, this is the best of the bunch.

Iley is imperfect and continually makes mistakes before slowly wising up. With Olson's other two books, they both had that "Oh! And it was all right there in front of me and I'm just noticing it!" conveniently about 30 pages before the end of the book. Fortunately, "Taffeta" has less of that. The ending isn't a perfectly-tied bow. It seemed more realistic in how the character has to redeem herself to those she hurt during her careless fling.

There are points in the book where you'll go, "How could she be so stupid?!?" But realistically, isn't that part of life? Making mistakes that others may see as avoidable, but we need to go through those errors (and hopefully learn from them) to become a better person.