The human side of Hollywood is revealed in Stern’s strong debut.
An undercover celebrity reporter discovers there are things more important than the latest exclusive.
Ella Warren’s life is a whirlwind. As a freelance reporter for the Life, a leading celebrity gossip magazine and website, she has become the secret queen of Hollywood nightlife. By day, she's dependable Ella, but by night she transforms into her alter ego, Bella, a regular at all the celebrity hot spots and the glamorous and outrageous after-parties where the press isn't allowed. Despite her dedication to her job, she does have a set of rules for herself so she doesn’t cross the line and damage the confidence of her best friend, rising star and British heiress Holiday Hall. For one, Ella swears that she will report only on celebrity scandals that occur in public places and never divulge the sordid details she observes at Holiday’s friends’ homes. She also will never report on anything that would hurt Holiday or her closest friends. But after her long-term relationship with boyfriend and aspiring screenwriter Ethan crumbles and a demanding new editor-in-chief takes over at the magazine, Ella’s promises, both personal and professional, become harder to keep. Cutthroat editor Victoria Davis makes her freelance staff crazy when she institutes a points policy to determine who will stay on and who will be fired. While Ella tries to rise to the top, she also must stop and question who she is along the way. Ella’s friends and family are vivid and memorable, and the blind-item celebrity nomenclature, including “Rugged Award-Nominated Method Actor” and “Southern Girl-Next-Door Movie Star,” remains fresh and witty. Fast-paced and charming, the novel gives a glimpse into the secret world of celebrity—and celebrity reporting—that many readers will eat up like the latest tabloid or reality television show.
The human side of Hollywood is revealed in Stern’s strong debut.Pub Date: May 23, 2017
ISBN: 978-1-250-10679-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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
BOOK TO SCREEN
A tour de force.
In 1974, a troubled Vietnam vet inherits a house from a fallen comrade and moves his family to Alaska.
After years as a prisoner of war, Ernt Allbright returned home to his wife, Cora, and daughter, Leni, a violent, difficult, restless man. The family moved so frequently that 13-year-old Leni went to five schools in four years. But when they move to Alaska, still very wild and sparsely populated, Ernt finds a landscape as raw as he is. As Leni soon realizes, “Everyone up here had two stories: the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you.” There are many great things about this book—one of them is its constant stream of memorably formulated insights about Alaska. Another key example is delivered by Large Marge, a former prosecutor in Washington, D.C., who now runs the general store for the community of around 30 brave souls who live in Kaneq year-round. As she cautions the Allbrights, “Alaska herself can be Sleeping Beauty one minute and a bitch with a sawed-off shotgun the next. There’s a saying: Up here you can make one mistake. The second one will kill you.” Hannah’s (The Nightingale, 2015, etc.) follow-up to her series of blockbuster bestsellers will thrill her fans with its combination of Greek tragedy, Romeo and Juliet–like coming-of-age story, and domestic potboiler. She re-creates in magical detail the lives of Alaska's homesteaders in both of the state's seasons (they really only have two) and is just as specific and authentic in her depiction of the spiritual wounds of post-Vietnam America.
A tour de force.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-312-57723-0
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Oct. 30, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2017
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