Bringing Home The Birkin

Bringing Home The Birkin
By: Michael Tonello
254 pages

The legend of the Hermes Birkin bag is that there's supposedly a 2-3 year waiting list to get one. They also supposedly only make 100 of them every year. The operative word here being "supposedly". Michael Tonello took this as a challenge and turn getting & reselling Birkins into a career.

"Oh, how this book sucked. Let me count the ways..."



For starters, I think this book would have been a great expose article. It could even make a better movie- something along the lines of Confessions of a Shopaholic. This book has a classic case of too many pages with not enough substance to fill them. There just wasn't enough subject matter to keep me interested. It didn't help that it was a slow starter, which I, personally, don't like in books. This book is only 254 pages, but things didn't start happening until page 60. I'm all for getting the background information, but this seemed excessive to me. I felt the author could have set the stage in far less time.

I also didn't care to read about how the author met his soul mate and their romance. Nor did I have any interest in their vacation, or hotel stay, or the food they ate. I'm a fan of people finding and falling in love, but that wasn't what the book was about. I only wanted to read about how easy it was for him get as many Birkins as he did.

Sadly, I did a lot of skimming while reading this book and I'm not a skimmer when I read a book. There were several times I came close to putting the book down for good, but I wanted to read how the author had to get back a $22,000 Birkin one of his associates was holding ransom. I was disappointed when that turned out to be like the whole book... sounded more exciting than it really was. Once I got past that point I threw in the towel.

I couldn't tell you how the book ended, becuase I don't know. I just couldn't stay interested, though I tried in vain to. It's sad when you don't finish a book because you don't care how it ends. That was me with this book.

I must say that I learned some interesting things while reading the book. I didn't know that Hermes makes their own tissue paper for wrapping their crocodile handbags. Nor did I know that when you buy a crocodile Birkin you have to fill out special paperwork having to do with the fact that it's made of crocodile. I also learned a person can only buy 1 Birkin a day; Hermes has it's own museum; and it's own auction once a year. However, the buyers for their museum refuse to pay a lot of money for things.

There were several interesting things in the book, but just not enough to keep you going for 254 pages.


Rating: Borrow from the library. If you do buy it, RETURN IT