What if Anita and Cruella were best friends?

It’s 1953, and teenage Anita Weatherby and her family have just moved to a booming postwar London. While her older sister settles right in, to the delight of their parents, Anita finds their new school—and her academic rival, Roger Radcliffe—daunting. Nothing seems to be going Anita’s way until a glamorous, confident new student moves to town. Stella De Vil is haughty and aloof—but surprises everyone by taking an immediate liking to Anita.

Swept into the luxurious world of Stella’s high-end family fashion label, Anita soon finds herself the anticipated star of the House of De Vil’s next fashion show, where she’ll be modelling a family heirloom, the Weatherby diamond, and walking the catwalk with two adorable Dalmatian puppies to raise awareness for a local animal shelter. But when disaster strikes and the Weatherby diamond goes missing, Anita will have to decide whom she can trust before her life goes to the dogs.

Many people have speculated on the little throw-away line about Anita and Cruella’s school year friendship, and Calonita provides a fun backstory full of heart and fashion, and owning your confidence. Set after the war, Anita hopes to get top marks so she may get Highbrook scholarship and save money for her eventual dream of university. It’s her big dream, not just for uni, but hopefully get her parents to notice her for once and not her theater-kid sister.

Roger Radcliffe is also vying for that scholarship and they naturally butt heads with their competitive natures getting ahead of each other. Their rivalry is cute especially as readers know how they’re going to end up so they’ll enjoy seeing them slowly come to see past each other’s barbs and find they have a lot in common.

But their rivalry gets more heated thanks to the appearance of Stella De Vil. The fashion forward new girl that everyone is impressed by but Stella is impressed by Anita who is one of the few not vying for her attention.

Their friendship was at turns delightful and heartwarming. This Stella, nicknamed Cruella by a annoyed Roger, seems to take a lot of inspiration by the Glenn Close movie. With shades of Miranda Priestly, of course.

She wants fabulous, the bigger the better and she knows her worth. She doesn’t believe in making herself and looks down on those who don’t go after what they want. In that sense her friendship with Anita is beneficial to her. Anita feels down about her quiet sister status but is unsure what to do to change that. But Stella’s mantra, “I am important. I belong here. I am a force to be reckoned with” gives Anita the push to stand up for herself. The first step in having others recognize her is her realizing her own worth.

But Stella’s influence isn’t all positive. After all the girl is one of the original divas of the mod look. In building herself, she will cut others down, and selfishly puts her own needs before anyone else. She can be as cruel as her nickname why using the truth to hit at the weak points of her enemies.

Anita wobbles towards self-confidence she does make the mistake of forgetting to think of other’s feelings in protecting her own. That is the tragedy of their friendship as Anita softens Stella, she sees it as a threat to maintaining her hardness and protecting herself. She sees caring for others as a slippery slope of forgetting to care for herself. It’s not true but that’s just how she sees the world. That along with Anita forcing Stella to question some “cruel truths” (yeah title drop) is further fuel for her to cut off.

The overarching lesson that people are more than they appear on the surface is especially poignant as the De Vils are all about reputation and fashion as a field is about appearance rather than personality so Stella and those who know her are content to view as one way but Anita knows better.

It is hit heartwarmingly so when Anita confronts her parents about the unequal treatment between her and her sister and she learns that her so-called confident sister is not only the jealous cow she’s been acting like.

The mystery about the Wetherby diamond is twisty enough that red herrings are plausible though readers can probably figure out the true culprit. But I forgive their slowness as both girls are trying to deny what they know is the truth for the sake of their brief but important friendship.

Moreover, Calonita does a great job in depicting post-war, pre-mod England from highlighting the popular celebrities of the time, the sumptuous fashions (including Stella’s first creation) to how people of different socioeconomic classes are still on edge about saving and spending after the war. Plus there’s lots of adorable dogs. It’s all tightly plotted and sewn together tight.

I only wish that since the story open with a framing device set after the Radcliffe get the dalmatians back and questioning Cruella’s potential involvement that we got bookends with Anita revisiting her suspicions of Cruella after her flashback to the original Weatherby diamond mystery.

5 dalmatians.