I couldn’t cook but I could sew. It would have been better the other way around. Trapped in Kansas at the turn of the twentieth century, Nell Plat is seventeen, unhappily married, and the mother of two baby girls. No reality could be further from her secret dreams of glamour and excitement, dreams that will tempt her to do the unthinkable and run away to the glittering wonderland of Los Angeles and the burgeoning motion picture industry.
Lucky for Nell, her experience as a seamstress to the ladies of her Kansas town translates beautifully to work as a costumer to Hollywood in the Roaring Twenties. She renames herself Madame Annelle, and builds a new life for herself that looks so much more like the one she had always imagined. But a knock on the door threatens to rip apart the seams of her own carefully constructed costume, and Nell is forced to confront the legacy of her abandonment and deception. Can she rework the delicate fabric of her life?
“I couldn’t cook but I could sew. It would have been better the other way around.” So begins this witty and transporting new novel by the acclaimed Erin McGraw, introducing us to Nell Plat, who, at age seventeen, finds herself unhappily married and the mother of two baby girls. For a young woman with a hunger for excitement and glamour, Kansas circa 1900 offers nothing but a flat horizon. Still, Nell find some joy sewing and making dresses for women in town. Dreaming over her sewing machine, she begins to entertain ambitions she knows she cannot share.
Based on Erin McGraw’s grandmother’s life, here is the story—told in Nell’s own irreverent and wise voice—of what happens when Nell runs away to Los Angeles in the year 1901 as the new motion-picture industry is just taking root. Nell marries again, has a daughter, and goes into business as a costumer in the Hollywood of the Roaring Twenties, renaming herself Madame Annló
![The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard [Paperback]](/itemImage/2/3/8/8/2_2498992.jpg "The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard [Paperback] xxx")