Lulu in Babylon

Name: Lulu in Babylon
Author: Allison Silver
ISBN: 978-0-9905602-8-9

by Allison Silver ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 14, 2016

For lovers of Hollywood, this novel offers an immersive look at the past and present of the movie business, though its plot...

bookshelf

Silver (20th Century Travel, 2010) delivers a Hollywood coming-of-age story with a reverence for the stars and stories of old Hollywood.

Fifteen-year-old Lulu comes to Los Angeles to spend the summer with her father, Milo, a hotshot director, and her stepmother, Francesca, an actress on the rise. Lulu is there not only to spend time with her father after a long time away, but also because her mother, Claire, is battling cancer. Lulu is a fish out of water in glitzy Hollywood, having grown up in Boston with her patrician mother’s family, and she must learn to get by in the strange new environment. Silver also focuses on Ben Robbins, a producer trying to get a new production company off the ground, as well as on excerpts from the diary of Lulu’s grandfather, Abe. These entries give readers a slice of life from old Hollywood, filled with big stars and even bigger personalities. Parties and dinners make up the bulk of the book; Ben sets up meals to promote his projects, Abe writes about going to three parties or more per night, and Lulu goes to high-profile events with her father. At one, Lulu meets Connor, a young, handsome actor on the cusp of stardom, and they quickly hit it off, adding a romantic undercurrent to Lulu’s conventional story of growth. However, Silver’s frequent use of aforementioned party and dinner scenes gets repetitive; a trip on a yacht in the Mediterranean in the book’s latter half is a welcome change. Some analogies are clunky (“her voice was high and chirpy, as if she’d just had a date with a helium tank”), but, for the most part, Silver’s writing is clear and light. She also has a great handle on details, from the preferred brands of celebrities to the formulaic way that Hollywood people talk to one another, be it glad-handing industry talk or gossip. Lulu and Ben are well-drawn, but much of the supporting cast is thinly characterized, leading to an uneven reading experience.

For lovers of Hollywood, this novel offers an immersive look at the past and present of the movie business, though its plot beats may be overly familiar.

Pub Date: April 14, 2016

ISBN: 978-0-9905602-8-9

Page Count: 354

Publisher: Marmont Lane

Review Posted Online: June 4, 2016

Review Program: Kirkus Indie

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

bookshelf

This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana.

The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense.

This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.

Pub Date: June 1, 1985

ISBN: 068487122X

Page Count: 872

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: Sept. 30, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1985

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
IN A NARROW GRAVE
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THALIA
by Larry McMurtry

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAST KIND WORDS SALOON
by Larry McMurtry

- PERSPECTIVES
From the Editor’s Desk: Watching Revered Writers Watch Themselves

- IN THE NEWS
Novelist Larry McMurtry Dies at 84

- SEEN & HEARD
‘Lonesome Dove’ Is Pick for New Texas Book Club

bookshelf

THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

by J.D. Salinger ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 15, 1951

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

bookshelf

A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.

"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.