What readers think of The Last Collection, plus links to write your own review.

Lily starts her adult life with regret and reminders of the death of her newlywed husband. She gets a second chance at reawakening her passions in the couture fashion industry in Paris just before the Nazi Germany invasion. As an artist, she thinks in primary colors red, yellow, blue, and the emotions they evoke. Then, as she begins to live again, she adds in the secondary colors, whose meaning follow the blended meanings of their primary colors. A light wash of gray adds fogginess to a picture…and maybe life?

She goes to Paris to visit her brother who is studying to be a doctor. He experiences true love, and the extravagances of wealth, through his married girlfriend Ania. He takes Lilly to the House of Chanel, favored by Ania, to buy her an elegant party dress. However, Lilly wants a dress by Schiaparelli. The two designers are enemies in business and social circles. Lily acts as a neutral party to help each understand the other.

We follow Lily's life through the difficult times of friends and countries with opposite ideas and choices:  the classical, elegant, and practical vs the bold, experimental, and surreal. It is a time of connections and alliances, different backgrounds and futures, life and death. What choices do we make? How will it affect our future? How do we move forward? Lily learns a great deal as she and her friends and family deal with the effects of WWII. Our choices remain with us forever and some are forgiven, others are not.

I found this an interesting story about the rivalry between two famous couturiers in the days before Paris fell to the Germans in WWII. It captures the sense of foreboding while Parisians waited for the inevitable. I would have rated it higher if the writing had been better. The narrator was an artist and seemed to need a color before every noun. Annoying and heavy handed. The fictional love stories seemed contrived and in some cases unbelievable. What she did well was capture a time and culture and a Paris that will never be the same.