Review: What the Lady Wants: A Novel of Marshall Field and the Gilded Age by Renee Rosen

What the Lady Wants: A Novel of Marshall Field and the Gilded Age by Renee Rosen

Published  November 4th 2014 by NAL Trade

Paperback, 448 pages

Series: Stand-Alone

Genre: Historical Fiction

Source:  I got a copy of this book from the publisher  in exchange of an honest review.
Amazon | Goodreads

Summary from Goodreads

In late-nineteenth-century Chicago, visionary retail tycoon Marshall Field made his fortune wooing women customers with his famous motto: “Give the lady what she wants.” His legendary charm also won the heart of socialite Delia Spencer and led to an infamous love affair.

The night of the Great Fire, as seventeen-year-old Delia watches the flames rise and consume what was the pioneer town of Chicago, she can’t imagine how much her life, her city, and her whole world are about to change. Nor can she guess that the agent of that change will not simply be the fire, but more so the man she meets that night.…

Leading the way in rebuilding after the fire, Marshall Field reopens his well-known dry goods store and transforms it into something the world has never seen before: a glamorous palace of a department store. He and his powerhouse coterie—including Potter Palmer and George Pullman—usher in the age of robber barons, the American royalty of their generation.

But behind the opulence, their private lives are riddled with scandal and heartbreak. Delia and Marshall first turn to each other out of loneliness, but as their love deepens, they will stand together despite disgrace and ostracism, through an age of devastation and opportunity, when an adolescent Chicago is transformed into the gleaming White City of the Chicago’s World’s Fair of 1893.

There are books out there that sometimes I have a hard time expressing what I want to say in my reviews. This one happens to be one of them. The writing was beautiful, the story was captivating and the characters were full of heart and marvelous.What the Lady Wants starts out with a bang when the author drops us in the middle of the hardest times in Chicago, during the night of the Great Fire, and it takes off and a full roller-coaster from there.

The story is told from a young lady's prospective by the name of Delia, who comes from a family with lots of money. Having all that money did not stop Delia from living quiet the difficult life. Marrying at a young age to a man named Arthur, who also came from money and having the unfortunate luck of finding herself completely in love with another married man. From falling into nasty society gossip, losing a lot of her friends and still able to pick herself up and move on from the hurtful snide remarks and being shut the door on by people who she thought were her friends.

The story follows three very unlikely friends. Marshall is a great character, who seemed to have been a great man. He had a failing marriage and has went through a lot of pains when it came to growing his store. The first time he lost his store in the Great Fire he rebuilt it from the ashes shortly after. I loved seeing how his story progressed over the ages, how Marshall wanted to move with the times and deliver something exquisite and different. The man has made history with everything that he went through. Just when things seemed like they were going smoothly something else knocking him down and he got back up again, stronger, better, bigger.

I watched the rise and fall of labor unions in the day and workers wanting money. The dark times that came as a result. I watched Delia struggle with being in love with Marshall, the affair, and whose wife refused to grant him the divorce they both wanted her to. I liked that the author threw in such a big curve ball with Delia's husband and his sexuality. Arthur came from money, and he was Delia's best friend but their marriage was solely based on friendship. He was a tortured soul in a way. He didn't amount to anything that his father wanted him to, and he was kind of lazy. Lot's of times we watched Delia compare him to Marsh, wishing he had half the motivation Marsh did - who also had money, but that did not stop him from changing the face of the dry goods store.

I had to go and look this up, which store exactly it was that he had build. Turns out it is one we all know these days as Macy's. After it's been sold off to another company and renamed.

A truly great and wonderful story. I adored the writing and found myself savoring every moment. With realistic characters, it was hard not to get pulled in!