This flapper-era cocktail ultimately has more fizzle than fizz.
A spunky young woman dances her way up from a job as a chambermaid at London’s grandest hotel to a chorus girl and beyond during the Roaring ’20s.
Dorothy Lane is not known as Dolly Daydream for nothing. She may be washing clothes at London’s famed Savoy Hotel, but her head is filled with Jazz Age fantasies of appearing in the West End or Hollywood. The hotel is full of celebs and glitterati, the so-called Bright Young People of British society, who fill the bustling ballrooms. In the first of a number of improbably lucky coincidences, Dolly literally bumps into Perry Clements, the brother of Loretta May, her superstar idol, on the street. Shortly thereafter, in another stroke of unlikely good fortune, Perry advertises for a “muse,” and—surprise of surprises!—Dolly coincidentally answers the ad. At 32, Perry’s sister is the breathtaking beautiful darling of the gallery girls, of whom Dolly is one: shop girls and domestics who fill the cheap theater seats and live on tabloid accounts of the stars. Though she's only a few years older than Dolly, Loretta is world-weary, awash in gin and morphine, with secret health issues. In a blend of “Cinderella” and Pygmalion, (spoiler alert, but isn’t it predictable?), Dolly miraculously becomes Loretta’s protégée. Gaynor (The Girl Who Came Home, 2012, etc.), a good storyteller, mars her tale by straining too hard for profundity and relying on hyperbole; Loretta describes Dolly as “the kind of girl one discovers perhaps once in a decade, a rough diamond waiting to be polished and brought out to dazzle for all the world to see.” Though the book more than teases with romance-novel tropes—will Dolly end up with Perry or with her hometown amour Teddy Cooper, a solder broken by the Great War?—the only real romance here is between Dolly and the stage.
This flapper-era cocktail ultimately has more fizzle than fizz.Pub Date: June 7, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-06-240347-6
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 29, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2016
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.
Norwegian novelist Jacobsen folds a quietly powerful coming-of-age story into a rendition of daily life on one of Norway’s rural islands a hundred years ago in a novel that was shortlisted for the 2017 Man Booker International Prize.
Ingrid Barrøy, her father, Hans, mother, Maria, grandfather Martin, and slightly addled aunt Barbro are the owners and sole inhabitants of Barrøy Island, one of numerous small family-owned islands in an area of Norway barely touched by the outside world. The novel follows Ingrid from age 3 through a carefree early childhood of endless small chores, simple pleasures, and unquestioned familial love into her more ambivalent adolescence attending school off the island and becoming aware of the outside world, then finally into young womanhood when she must make difficult choices. Readers will share Ingrid’s adoration of her father, whose sense of responsibility conflicts with his romantic nature. He adores Maria, despite what he calls her “la-di-da” ways, and is devoted to Ingrid. Twice he finds work on the mainland for his sister, Barbro, but, afraid she’ll be unhappy, he brings her home both times. Rooted to the land where he farms and tied to the sea where he fishes, Hans struggles to maintain his family’s hardscrabble existence on an island where every repair is a struggle against the elements. But his efforts are Sisyphean. Life as a Barrøy on Barrøy remains precarious. Changes do occur in men’s and women’s roles, reflected in part by who gets a literal chair to sit on at meals, while world crises—a war, Sweden’s financial troubles—have unexpected impact. Yet the drama here occurs in small increments, season by season, following nature’s rhythm through deaths and births, moments of joy and deep sorrow. The translator’s decision to use roughly translated phrases in conversation—i.e., “Tha’s goen’ nohvar” for "You’re going nowhere")—slows the reading down at first but ends up drawing readers more deeply into the world of Barrøy and its prickly, intensely alive inhabitants.
A deeply satisfying novel, both sensuously vivid and remarkably poignant.Pub Date: April 7, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-77196-319-0
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Biblioasis
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
In Clavell's last whopper, Tai-pan, the hero became tai-pan (supreme ruler) of Hong Kong following England's victory in the first Opium War. Clavell's new hero, John Blackthorne, a giant Englishman, arrives in 17th century Japan in search of riches and becomes the right arm of the warlord Toranaga who is even more powerful than the Emperor. Superhumanly self-confident (and so sexually overendowed that the ladies who bathe him can die content at having seen the world's most sublime member), Blackthorne attempts to break Portugal's hold on Japan and encourage trade with Elizabeth I's merchants. He is a barbarian not only to the Japanese but also to Portuguese Catholics, who want him dispatched to a non-papist hell. The novel begins on a note of maelstrom-and-tempest ("'Piss on you, storm!' Blackthorne raged. 'Get your dung-eating hands off my ship!'") and teems for about 900 pages of relentless lopped heads, severed torsos, assassins, intrigue, war, tragic love, over-refined sex, excrement, torture, high honor, ritual suicide, hot baths and breathless haikus. As in Tai-pan, the carefully researched material on feudal Oriental money matters seems to he Clavell's real interest, along with the megalomania of personal and political power. After Blackthorne has saved Toranaga's life three times, he is elevated to samurai status, given a fief and made a chief defender of the empire. Meanwhile, his highborn Japanese love (a Catholic convert and adulteress) teaches him "inner harmony" as he grows ever more Eastern. With Toranaga as shogun (military dictator), the book ends with the open possibility of a forthcoming sequel. Engrossing, predictable and surely sellable.
Pub Date: June 23, 1975
ISBN: 0385343248
Page Count: 998
Publisher: Atheneum
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1975
BOOK TO SCREEN
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