Serious, bookish feminist Alyssa Harad didn't expect to fall in love with perfume. When she stumbled onto a few scent blogs during a late-night writing session, she intended to click around and click away. Instead, she found herself captivated by vivid prose describing the images and memories conjured up by the notes of various perfumes. Intrigued, Harad began clandestinely ordering samples online, sneaking into perfume boutiques, even attending a local smelling salon presided over by the mysterious "Curator." She uses the metaphor of seduction to trace her affair with perfume from secret flirtation to full-blown obsession.
As her new fascination grew, Harad also found herself navigating the world of wedding planning: just as intimidating as the world of perfume, and even more aggressively feminine. Hesitant to become a bride, reluctant to admit her passion for fragrance to her Birkenstock-wearing friends, Harad nevertheless found herself transformed by her fixation with scent. The pleasure she found in perfume didn't erase her feminist unease or mollify all her wedding-day fears, but it did give her a new image of herself: more alluring, more secure in her particular brand of femininity, more attuned to the details (sensory and otherwise) of her life.
Full of luscious scent descriptions and fascinating tidbits about the perfume industry, and peopled by elegant, quirky characters (who all smell wonderful), this memoir will send readers dashing to the nearest perfume counter for a bit of olfactory bliss. --Katie Noah Gibson, blogger at Cakes, Tea and Dreams