26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not Bridezillas - Real Brides, December 27, 2011
This review is from: The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters (Hardcover)
"The Magic Room" is a far gentler version of many of the wedding/bridal-ganza TV shows that seem to be taking over the airwaves. (And that comes from a person who spent a summer GLUED to "Say Yes to the Dress".)
The author gives the reader back-story into several of the brides that purchased their wedding dress at Becker's Bridal - and more interesting to me, back-story on the family that started this store decades ago.
The pace of the book was a bit slow for me, as each bride's story is divided by stories about the family behind the dresses. Each bride would get an introduction, and then there would be several chapters before she appeared again, so I kept forgetting which bride was which.
Towards the end, I started to feel more connected to the lives of these women and their families, but I still didn't feel there was a cohesive theme or message to the book. It really did come across as a kind version of the wedding shows - the bits of story about real people and their weddings - without the snark.
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17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An Inside Look at a Small Town Bridal Shop and the Women Who Visited It to Help Create Their Dream Wedding, January 1, 2012
This review is from: The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters (Hardcover)
The Magic Room by Jeffrey Zaslow is a non-fiction look at Becker's Bridal shop, a fourth generation family business that still operates in the small town of Fowler, Michigan. Although this book looks at the bridal business and also chronicles eight families' quest for a bridal gown and their story, Zaslow's initial intent was to look at the topic of love as he raises his own daughters.
Zaslow is able to alternate between the story of Becker's Bridal Shop and its history as well as the eight brides' stories he shares. Each is a unique story - from a widowed mother of five who is remarrying to a young woman injured in a car accident just a few months before her wedding and still undergoing therapy and medical procedures to correct the injuries she sustains. I enjoyed reading about each bride and their path to this small town bridal shop.
As times have changed I am amazed that this small town business can still exist and compete with the bridal chains and other competitors, a testament to the concept of hard work and excellent customer service, creating a place where mothers want to take their daughters as they look to plan a wedding.
I enjoyed Zaslow's writing, which I became familiar with while reading The Girls from Ames, also by Zaslow. Yet, there were times when I felt he made things seem too picture perfect, something I noticed in his previous book. As someone who is married and planned a wedding, I didn't really relate to Zaslow's theory of such a preoccupation with the wedding dress a bride-to-be selected. Tears were not shed by me or my mother or anyone else who saw me in my wedding dress. I didn't stand in a Magic Room on a pedestal to model my dress for a group of bridesmaids as many of these women did. While I do wish I had perhaps looked longer or had a better idea of the type of dress I wanted, the importance placed on this event in this book seems over the top to me.
Still, The Magic Room made for good reading. I enjoyed reading about the changes in brides through the years, the personal stories of future brides, and the ins and outs of this family business.
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Dazzling Love Story for Mothers and Fathers, January 3, 2012
This review is from: The Magic Room: A Story About the Love We Wish for Our Daughters (Hardcover)
If the mirrors of the Magic Room could speak, they would have compelling tales to tell about love, life, parenting and marriage. Instead, Wall Street Journal columnist and author Jeffrey Zaslow has given them voice in his engaging new book, The Magic Room: A Story about the Love We Wish for our Daughters.
This new book (Gotham Books, January 2012) tells the story of four generations of a family who have run Becker's Bridal Shop in Fowler, Michigan since 1934, a shop that has become a destination shopping experience for brides in the Midwest. Fowler only has a population of 1100 residents but behind the shop's doors are some 2500 wedding gowns, "more wedding dresses per capita than any other municipality in the United States, or perhaps in the world," he writes.
An estimated 100,000 women have passed through the shop, trying on gowns and seeking advice first from Grandma Eva, and then from successive generations of Becker sales ladies in search of the perfect dress that reflects their dreams, lifestyle, and budget. "The Becker's building, meanwhile, is crammed not just with dresses, but with history," writes Zaslow.
The author follows eight women who have stood on the circular pedestal in the Magic Room, once a steel vault in a former bank, which has been transformed into a fairytale setting with infinity mirrored walls, gold paneling, and soft lighting. This rich, multi-layered story reflects on the history of brides and marriage in America amidst shifting values and cultural mores -- and powerfully describes the emotional relationships between fathers and daughters, mothers and daughters, and women and men.
For the bride who is about to marry, the "Magic Room" is the centerpiece of the shop, the place at the top of the stairs where she tries on her final selection of the wedding dress she'll remember for the rest of her life. From the perspective of the business, this is the intimate space where emotions soar and sales are clinched.
Few people can tell stories with as much heart and feeling as New York Times best-selling author Zaslow, who previously collaborated with Randy Pausch on The Last Lecture; Chesley Sullenberger on Highest Duty; and Gabrielle Giffords and Mark Kelly, on Gabby. In my opinion, few men can tell the stories of women with the depth of understanding that Zaslow brought to The Girls from Ames and now brings to The Magic Room. Perhaps, being a father to three young women and sounding board for tens of thousands of readers of his newspaper columns over 24 years has given him the requisite trench experience to speak for them.
Zaslow doesn't shy away from the hurdles and tragedies of romance. Stories about the spectacular promise of wedding days wouldn't be complete without mentioning the rough passages of adolescent love, the emptiness of losing family members, the trauma of weddings postponed or cancelled, and the disappointment of marriages that wind up loveless or in divorce. Each of the eight stories, as well as the one of the Becker brood, reads like a brief memoir -- of the emotional lives of women of different ages and circumstances.
As a mother, this beautifully written book by a wise and gifted storyteller had me spellbound. It was hard to put down because the series of love stories, like the bow on a wedding gift, are all tied together by a magical moment in a magical place. In the book's introduction, Zaslow writes, "...on the very first day I visited Becker's I truly sensed that this was a place that could illuminate the most poignant aspects of a woman's journey to the altar." This wonderful author has done just that.
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