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A HOLLYWOOD LIFE

Lively, likable novel from Freeman (a story collection, A Hollywood Education, 1986; The Last Days of Alfred Hitchcock, 1984) about a child star who grows into an adult star. Questions abound as the reader digs into what is at nearly every turn a familiar story that keeps glancing off real lives without ever focusing on one. At novel's beginning, the heroine drowns near Santa Barbara under circumstances very much like those that claimed former child star Natalie Wood, at about the same age, so one expects a roman Ö clef about Natalie. But when we get into her child-star period, the novel keeps echoing Shirley Temple. At a later age, the heroine—who marries a radical reporter who spends two years in Vietnam—wants to stand up against the government and later does a movie about exercise and weight reduction—all from the hills of Fonda. So what Freeman gives us in Carla Tate, born Karen Teitel, is a collage heroine but one with a strong enough character to carry the story herself. Carla makes her first screen appearance at six days of age. A few years later she's making a kiddie series at MGM as Georgina with her horse Lewis. What the studio sees instantly in little Carla is a screen natural, a magnetically relaxed actress. After some initial sex experiences, 17-year-old Carla falls under the protective hand of her married lover Jack Markel, 30 years her senior. Jack is a huge power and dark handler of labor unions. It's his idea that Carla marry and have kids while keeping up a liaison with him, and Carla goes through three husbands without ever discarding Jack. When her end comes, nothing much is resolved, no sense of tragedy stirs the reader. It's all as empty as a wonderful-to-watch piece of fluff, like The Barefoot Contessa. Sharp Hollywood detail, gripping—that will fade like smoke.

Pub Date: July 31, 1991

ISBN: 0-671-72738-9

Page Count: 320

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 1991

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THE CATCHER IN THE RYE

A strict report, worthy of sympathy.

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.

Pub Date: June 15, 1951

ISBN: 0316769177

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951

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MAGIC HOUR

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.

Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.

Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.

Pub Date: March 1, 2006

ISBN: 0-345-46752-3

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Ballantine

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005

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