Before Coco Chanel became a household name, breaking fashion rules to create her own distinctive brand, she was Gabrielle Chanel, one of five children whose mother died young and whose father abandoned them. Sent with her sisters to an orphanage, Gabrielle impressed the nuns with her sewing skills and spent her childhood plotting her escape. As a young woman, she took the nickname Coco, becoming a seamstress and experimenting with hat making. Ambitious but penniless, Chanel caught the attention of a few wealthy Parisians who purchased her hats and whose connections gained her entrée to the exclusive circles of high society. In Mademoiselle Chanel, C.W. Gortner (the Elizabeth I Spymaster Chronicles) draws a vivid fictional portrait of Chanel's rise to fame--provocative, acerbic and bewitching, like the woman herself.
Framed by two scenes detailing the comeback Chanel staged in 1954, the novel unfolds in five acts, describing Chanel's childhood, her early career as a struggling seamstress in Vichy and her unprecedented success as a couturier and perfumer. Gortner delves into Chanel's complicated relationships with men, her friends in Parisian high society and bohemian circles and her uneasy connection to the occupying Nazis during World War II. Drawing on recent claims that Chanel was a collaborator, Gortner explores the difficult choices made necessary by war and privation, and shows the melancholy side of a woman known around the world but often deeply lonely.
Absorbing, heartbreaking and salacious--like Chanel's life story--Mademoiselle Chanel is a sensitive portrait of a complex cultural icon. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams