This odd book stands to anger Lucille Ball’s fans and bemuse Darin Strauss’.
A fictionalized version of Lucille Ball’s life, including a love affair with the author’s grandfather.
For decades, Strauss, the author of the award-winning memoir Half a Life (2010) as well as novels including Chang and Eng (2000), has been obsessed with the fact that his grandfather Isidore Strauss might have met Lucille Ball at a 1949 party thrown by Donald Trump’s father to celebrate the destruction of the Pavilion of Fun on Coney Island. The complicated concoction of memoir and fiction that has emerged from this spark of inspiration interweaves imagined scenes from Ball’s life on and off the set with imagined scenes from his grandfather’s. Between these chapters, he slips in vignettes of what seems to be memoir, documenting his earlier attempts to bring attention to this passion project. The novel begins at Trump’s party, written up in a highly stylized, flashy prose style: “Hey, that’s your favorite celebrity over there. On the boardwalk, her white shoes scuffed black with sand. (If she’s not famous now, just wait.) She’s striding—confidenting—right into this party.” Before the night’s over, Desi Arnaz will have punched Isidore Strauss in the eye. What follows incorporates impressive research into the progress of Ball’s career—the author hopes to “remind people that Lucille Ball starred in America’s first big-time interracial love story; was the first powerful woman in Hollywood; that she owned more movie sets at one point than did any movie studio.” However, in addition to grafting his made-up story onto the facts of Ball’s life, he admits to monkeying with other details, which undercuts even the informational aims of the book. Mingling fictional characters with famous historical ones worked to brilliant effect in E.L. Doctorow’s Ragtime and many similar novels since, but this feels more like a thought experiment than a compelling story. The jaunty narrator is not just omniscient, but presumptuous and intrusive, spending a good deal of time in the characters’ heads, confidently reporting their thoughts. In a scene in which Ball is having sexual intercourse with the author’s grandfather, Strauss has her meditate on why she likes him so much. “Really, it was the fucking. It’s hard not to love something you’re really good at. She was really good at that.” Oof.
This odd book stands to anger Lucille Ball’s fans and bemuse Darin Strauss’.Pub Date: Aug. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9276-2
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 17, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 2020
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.
A love story about a life of second chances.
In Nassau, in the Bahamas, casino detective Vincent LaPorta grills Alfie Logan, who’d come up a winner three times in a row at the roulette table and walked away with $2 million. “How did you do it?” asks the detective. Alfie calmly denies cheating. You wired all the money to a Gianna Rule, LaPorta says. Why? To explain, Alfie produces a composition book with the words “For the Boss, to Be Read Upon My Death” written on the cover. Read this for answers, Alfie suggests, calling it a love story. His mother had passed along to him a strange trait: He can say “Twice!” and go back to a specific time and place to have a do-over. But it only works once for any particular moment, and then he must live with the new consequences. He can only do this for himself and can’t prevent anyone from dying. Alfie regularly uses his power—failing to impress a girl the first time, he finds out more about her, goes back in time, and presto! She likes him. The premise is of course not credible—LaPorta doesn’t buy it either—but it’s intriguing. Most people would probably love to go back and unsay something. The story’s focus is on Alfie’s love for Gianna and whether it’s requited, unrequited, or both. In any case, he’s obsessed with her. He’s a good man, though, an intelligent person with ordinary human failings and a solid moral compass. Albom writes in a warm, easy style that transports the reader to a world of second chances and what-ifs, where spirituality lies close to the surface but never intrudes on the story. Though a cynic will call it sappy, anyone who is sick to their core from the daily news will enjoy this escape from reality.
Have tissues ready as you read this. A small package will do.Pub Date: Oct. 7, 2025
ISBN: 9780062406682
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: July 18, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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
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