A child movie star disappears and emerges 45 years later as a blue-haired trailer-park hag in Dunne's lurid tale of Hollywood sex, crime, and deception. In the 1930s, Blue Tyler was Tinseltown's highest paid ``cinemoppet''—Cosmopolitan Studio's meal ticket until she turned 23, when she fell from the biz and, to all appearances, off the planet. Decades later, researching a dopey cop movie, screenwriter Jack Broderick (back from The Red, White, and Blue, 1987) crashes into her accidentally in Detroit, where she is living in anonymous squalor. He alerts his producers that the real story is the discovery of the now elderly Blue Tyler, scraps everything else, and—helped by a vulgar extortionist policeman—gets the scoop on her life. All this is done through interviews with people who knew her, notably her ex-lover and publicist who afforded her a lifelong stipend, and her director, a one-legged war veteran and one of the only men in LA who didn't sleep with Blue (he's gay). Other sources include newspaper articles and court transcripts that reveal Blue's affair with vicious gangster Jacob King, who was gunned down in Playland, his tacky Las Vegas hotel, and various classified documents unearthed by shady connections. Interviews with brassy, foul-mouthed Blue herself (before she disappears again) offset the testimony of those who knew her. The result is an intriguing puzzle of identity. Does Blue's self-portrait match the image that friends and the public paint? Jack's compulsive fixation and frustration with her mount as he struggles to complete his research and cram her legend into a hit screenplay with integrity. At the end of the seamy story, the truth remains unclear, but nobody cares. The constant maybes and the run-on rants are made tolerable, even beguiling, by Dunne's bristling prose and savage cinematics. Dunne delivers grit with polish in this wicked celebrity archaeology. (Author tour)
Pub Date: Aug. 1, 1994
ISBN: 0-679-42427-X
Page Count: 496
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1994
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s...
The traumatic homecoming of a wounded warrior.
The daughter of alcoholics who left her orphaned at 17, Jolene “Jo” Zarkades found her first stable family in the military: She’s served over two decades, first in the army, later with the National Guard. A helicopter pilot stationed near Seattle, Jo copes as competently at home, raising two daughters, Betsy and Lulu, while trying to dismiss her husband Michael’s increasing emotional distance. Jo’s mettle is sorely tested when Michael informs her flatly that he no longer loves her. Four-year-old Lulu clamors for attention while preteen Betsy, mean-girl-in-training, dismisses as dweeby her former best friend, Seth, son of Jo’s confidante and fellow pilot, Tami. Amid these challenges comes the ultimate one: Jo and Tami are deployed to Iraq. Michael, with the help of his mother, has to take over the household duties, and he rapidly learns that parenting is much harder than his wife made it look. As Michael prepares to defend a PTSD-afflicted veteran charged with Murder I for killing his wife during a dissociative blackout, he begins to understand what Jolene is facing and to revisit his true feelings for her. When her helicopter is shot down under insurgent fire, Jo rescues Tami from the wreck, but a young crewman is killed. Tami remains in a coma and Jo, whose leg has been amputated, returns home to a difficult rehabilitation on several fronts. Her nightmares in which she relives the crash and other horrors she witnessed, and her pain, have turned Jo into a person her daughters now fear (which in the case of bratty Betsy may not be such a bad thing). Jo can't forgive Michael for his rash words. Worse, she is beginning to remind Michael more and more of his homicide client. Characterization can be cursory: Michael’s earlier callousness, left largely unexplained, undercuts the pathos of his later change of heart.
Less bleak than the subject matter might warrant—Hannah’s default outlook is sunny—but still, a wrenching depiction of war’s aftermath.Pub Date: Jan. 31, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-57720-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Dec. 18, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2012
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