The Lost Dresses of Italy by M.A. McLaughlin

 

5*

All the best historical fiction seamlessly blends real events and people with fictional characters and, often, periods of historical figures’ lives from the author’s imagination. In this dual timeline story, McLaughlin introduces her readers to Marianne Baxter, a war widow and costume curator, who is invited to Verona, Italy in 1947 by a friend to research and restore three Victorian-era gowns for the reopening of a museum that was damaged during the war. When she finds a letter in a sleeve addressed to famed poet Christina Rossetti from her father, it begins a hunt for clues not only about the woman who wore the dresses, but also how they ended up in a walled-over room in the museum. In her postscript, McLaughlin mentions a cryptic quote from Christina Rossetti’s brother William, who accompanied her on her trip to Italy in 1865, which presumably was the inspiration for this fictionalized period of her life. “Had she [Christina] henceforth lived in Italy…she would, I believe, have been a much happier woman than she was.”

The story opens with a murder outside the museum, when a young man in the Italian Resistance is double-crossed by a compatriot who kills him for the emerald he was about to sell to raise money for their cause. In the letter, Christina’s father writes of a pendant that she would have found after his death, a probable connection to the murder. As Marianne begins to follow the clues as to what transpired during Christina’s visit to Italy, it angers the museum director, Alessandro Forni, whose cousin was the murder victim. As he tells her, “Wading into the unfamiliar waters of a foreign country, which has so recently endured a bitter war, can stir up nothing but ugly things lurking in the depths.” This foreshadows what becomes a suspenseful mystery that combines the restoration of various art forms with jewelry theft, the physical and emotional toll war’s death and destruction had on the people and the morally dubious choices they had to make to survive, and an epic love story that has faint echoes to the most famous star-crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet. So, it’s only fitting that most of the book is set in Verona.

McLaughlin chose a dual POV, featuring two creative women eighty years apart who went to Italy and found love when they weren’t looking. Their trajectories were different, but their time there profoundly changed them. Don’t be surprised if you end up going down a rabbit hole Googling information about the Rossetti family, especially after reading the conversations between Christina and her more famous brother, Dante, both of whom their mother referred to as the “storms” (versus their other siblings, William and Maria, who were the “calms”). The Lost Dresses of Italy is a compelling story with vibrant characters driven by greed, obsession, passion, and grief, one that you won’t quickly forget. Highly recommended.

I received a complimentary ARC of this book from Alcove Press through NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Opinions expressed are completely my own.