A delightful human drama about accepting the past and forging a future in 1930s Tinseltown.
Moyer offers a behind-the-scenes look at the Golden Age of Hollywood in this historical novel.
It’s 1938, and Frances Healey has vowed to pursue an “interesting” career, so she doesn’t hesitate to accept a job at VistaGlen Studios in Hollywood. Frances possesses the qualities of a successful office worker: She’s discreet, witty, and extremely observant. But Frances finds it difficult to follow all the rules she learned in secretarial school when she becomes drawn to her new employer, movie producer and widower Lawrence Merrill. (“There was a line to his cheek and a downward curve to his mouth that was somehow appealing. It was disconcerting to discover this. She would much rather work for an ugly man.”) She transgresses by sharing details of her private life and involving him in her family drama. The pair grow even closer while on a business trip to Napa Valley, trying to save his latest film from the scrap heap. Frances is also challenged by the prickly women in Lawrence’s life: his precocious and sensitive 13-year-old daughter, Sally; his obnoxious and damaged starlet girlfriend, Belinda Vail; and the opinionated and surprisingly still-alive subject of his new biopic project, Kitty Ridley. The author captures 1930s California with meticulous detail and has masterfully created characters with depth and authenticity. She accomplishes this partly by using simple actions to portray complex personalities: Sally uses a fake English accent when she wants attention; Belinda wears lily-of-the-valley-scented perfume because it symbolizes purity; Kitty wears a turban to maintain a sense of elegance. Frances is clearly the protagonist, but few characters in this novel merely serve as foils; Moyer treats them all with respect and allows them arcs of their own. She also paces the story very well—while the stakes seem low (does it really matter whether or not this particular film is made?), the narrative thrums with suspense. The snappy dialogue both reveals character traits and furthers the plot.
A delightful human drama about accepting the past and forging a future in 1930s Tinseltown.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9781647427221
Page Count: 344
Publisher: She Writes Press
Review Posted Online: May 24, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.
Two brothers—one a lawyer, one a chess prodigy—work through the death of their father, their complicated romantic lives, and their even more tangled relationship with each other.
Ten years separate the Koubek brothers. In his early 30s, Peter has turned his past as a university debating champ into a career as a progressive lawyer in Dublin. Ivan is just out of college, struggling to make ends meet through freelance data analysis and reckoning with his recent free fall in the world chess rankings. When their father dies of cancer, the cracks in the brothers’ relationship widen. “Complete oddball” Ivan falls in love with an older woman, an arts center employee, which freaks Peter out. Peter juggles two women at once: free-spirited college student Naomi and his ex-girlfriend Sylvia, whose life has changed drastically since a car accident left her in chronic pain. Emotional chaos abounds. Rooney has struck a satisfying blend of the things she’s best at—sensitively rendered characters, intimacies, consideration of social and philosophical issues—with newer moves. Having the book’s protagonists navigating a familial rather than romantic relationship seems a natural next step for Rooney, with her astutely empathic perception, and the sections from Peter’s point of view show Rooney pushing her style into new territory with clipped, fragmented, almost impressionistic sentences. (Peter on Sylvia: “Must wonder what he’s really here for: repentance, maybe. Bless me for I have. Not like that, he wants to tell her. Why then. Terror of solitude.”) The risk: Peter comes across as a slightly blurry character, even to himself—he’s no match for the indelible Ivan—so readers may find these sections less propulsive at best or over-stylized at worst. Overall, though, the pages still fly; the characters remain reach-out-and-touch-them real.
Though not perfect, a clear leap forward for Rooney; her grandmaster status remains intact.Pub Date: Sept. 24, 2024
ISBN: 9780374602635
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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