Breakfast at Bloomingdale’s by Kristen Kemp

Cat’s a girl with a dream and a plan to achieve it. She’s going to New York City to be a famous fashion designer; particularly, she wants her own label to be sold at Bloomingdale’s. For all of Cat’s life, that’s been her dream, but now she’s perfectly poised to accomplish it by entering CosmoGIRL! and Bloomingdale’s The Finished Line fashion design contest. Armed with access to her late grandmother Nina’s bank account, killer design and sewing skills, and a one-way ticket to New York City, Cat is all ready for her new life. But once she arrives, it’s a little different and harder that she expected, and adjustments will have to be made accordingly, because giving up is not an option. The competition better look out. New and improved Cat Zappe, famous designed to be, is taking New York City by fashion storm.

By no surprise, Breakfast at Bloomingdale’s is all about fashion, but it’s also about hard work, dreams, and relationships. Most fashion novels I’ve read deal with the tail end of the fashion industry, the already crafted clothes and modeling. This story gives me new respect for the designing end; I had no idea that much education, experimentation, and design went into making the finished fashion product. I also didn’t know that designer hopefuls could be just as catty, for lack of a better word, as competitive models; Cat’s ability to keep a cool head most of the time in these situations earned even more of my respect. I absolutely loved reading about Cat’s character. She has impressive commitment and determination in reaching her goals and, more often than not, is rather smart in navigating through her relationships. I greatly admired her maturity and self control as well, and all this just made me hope she’d accomplish her dreams. Breakfast at Bloomingdale’s is a thoroughly enjoyable story to read because it shows that everything, for better or worse, is interconnected, that things have a way of working themselves out in the end, and that lack of success doesn’t necessarily translate into failure.

I recommend Breakfast and Bloomingdale’s for fans of Violet on the Runway by Melissa Walker, Airhead by Meg Cabot, and the America’s Next Top Model series by Taryn Bell as well as to any teen girl, because Cat is a characters after ever reader’s heart. I look forward to reading more of Kemp’s writing, particularly a possible fashion savvy sequel to this sweet book.

Rating: 4.5

Review copy from publisher Scholastic