When he hires an unsavory agent to represent him, she becomes Gus’s protector yet Gus is unable to protect her. Photographer and model become inseparable –Iris eventually comes to terms with the fact that Gus is an artist - a tortured soul who, even as he adores her, warns her repeatedly that he’s no good for her. Iris agrees to be photographed au naturel –a state that she seems to spend a good deal of time in considering that she’s a fashion model, not an adult film star. Small problem on set - the featured clothing has not yet arrived. Suddenly we have time traveled back almost twenty years to when Iris first encounters Gus on a Genius Group shoot. Another problem with the story is that the narrative often shifts from points of view and present to past without warning. The real action doesn’t occur until Iris arrives in Paris. The inauthentic mother-daughter conversations with Lou on a road trip to the lawyer’s office, a writing device meant to fill the reader in on Iris’s backstory, didn’t ring true to me. I found it tough getting past the highly descriptive, plodding beginning. Also, there’s a notorious tabloid threatening to expose very private images of her past, oh my! However, Iris must return to the scene of her traumatic experience to face her demons to recover a missing collection of his work.

A FedEx from a lawyer informs her that her long-estranged lover, celebrated art and fashion photographer Gus de Santos, and father that Lou has never met, has unexpectedly died. Protagonist, Iris de Valadé has a secret - 17 years ago she suddenly fled Paris leaving the love of her life and her successful modeling career to return to her parents’ home in New York - oh, and she’s pregnant.Īs the story opens, Iris, now a sculptor, is raising now teenage daughter Lou on a sleepy northern California ranch when her past comes back to haunt her. An ex-model’s journey through the dark side of fashion, where beautiful people do ugly things” reads the book’s blurb. “The loss of innocence, the death of beauty, and the price of success. You know when a good suspense novel has you on the edge of your seat waiting to see how all the loose threads get woven together? Wildchilds, a first novel written by fashion industry insider Eugenia Melian released last week to coincide with Fashion Month, never really sews up the garment.

Wildchilds by Eugenia Melian