An intriguing, if overlong, reimaging of old-time entertainment history.
In this historical novel, Perlstein chronicles the rise of a transgender performer from Havana to Hollywood.
Anshel Sobel is born in Warsaw around 1910 and raised in New York City from the age of 2 under the American name Albert. In 1929, she fakes her own death, leaves her family behind, and heads for Havana under a new name: Lola Torres. She’s a talented pianist and singer, and she finds a place to stay with the sister of the Sobels’ housekeeper. Cuba seems like a land of opportunity for Lola, but it’s also a land of danger where her transgender status, Judaism, and Communist sympathies can lead to serious trouble. She’s soon performing in some of Havana’s hottest clubs under an even newer name: Lola Flores. She can’t keep her past completely hidden, however; an empathetic costumer, Fernando Fallon, who’s also transgender, tells her upon their first meeting, “You are not the first woman I have met who was born what seemed a man. Or a man born a woman.” Fernando becomes Lola’s secret-keeper and adviser, and together they embark on an impressive career, finding stardom not just in nightclubs, but on the Broadway stage, on radio and records, and even in films. Her celebrity brings her into the orbit of mobsters such as Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel and Meyer Lansky and to the attention of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. It turns out that America is Lola’s land of opportunity after all, especially now that she’s there on her own terms. But as Lola’s star rises, the fear that her secret will be revealed lingers in the background.
Perlstein’s prose rolls out like a reel of film, convincingly illuminating early-1930s Cuba, late ’30s New York, and ’40s Los Angeles. At one point, for instance, Lola gets support from some familiar folks following her performance in the Ziegfeld Follies: “A hand patted Lola’s behind as the final curtain descended. ‘You were aces, kid,’ said Bob Hope, who’d had a previous Broadway hit. In the wings, Fanny Brice gave Lola a knip, pinching the flesh of Lola’s left cheek between her thumb and index finger. ‘Oy! A Cuban me, only prettier!’ ” Over the course of the novel, the author manages to get plenty of mileage out of Lola’s nesting-doll identities and aliases, which she uses to achieve a variety of goals. It’s a somewhat lengthy novel at nearly 450 pages, and, at times, it feels as if Perlstein is simply moving Lola through history for little reason other than the joy of encountering real-life celebrities and various world events. The book ultimately—and unexpectedly—has more to say about the American Jewish experience than about the transgender one, which readers may find intriguing or disappointing depending on their interests. Overall, this is a work that’s not quite a picaresque but not entirely serious in tone, either, and the book gets by, much like its protagonist, on the sheer bravado of its vision.
An intriguing, if overlong, reimaging of old-time entertainment history.Pub Date: March 30, 2022
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 356
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
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