A compelling and thoughtful family drama delightfully wrapped up in Hollywood glamour.
In this novel, a famous father and son clash during the preparations for Universal’s 1931 movie Frankenstein.
Stone’s story opens with a set of tabloid notes: Five months before the filming of Frankenstein, Hungarian star Bela Lugosi and impoverished actor Boris Karloff are in the running for the Monster role. Three days before the cameras start rolling, Carl Laemmle Jr. is having a panic attack. The tale’s protagonist, Junior is head of production at Universal and the son of Carl Laemmle Sr., the self-made founder of the studio. As Junior longs to take cinema into the future with films like Dracula and Frankenstein, his father remains set in his old ways of doing business. Junior’s key promotion to vice president of the studio hinges on his father’s approval of his Frankenstein production. Junior tells his dad: “It’s going to be our greatest picture ever.” But Carl Sr. has serious reservations: “A mad scientist building a creature from dead body parts. Who will want to see this?” While Junior chases reluctant actors and finicky directors to create the perfect movie, he attempts to test the solidity of his cinematic vision and to compromise with his dad. Junior is also focusing on managing his romantic and professional relationship with the ambitious, quick-witted actor Sidney Fox. As the drama unfolds, the tale offers the perspectives of Dracula star Lugosi and English native Karloff, both with varied experiences in Hollywood and different ideas about Frankenstein’s Monster.
The novel’s structure, in following the countdown to the filming of Frankenstein, gives the book the suspenseful feel of a doomsday drama or spy thriller movie. In addition, the author addresses the age-old, emotional idea of a son trying to make his father proud. At the center of this conflict is Junior’s struggle to retain his individualistic dreams of Hollywood’s future in the face of his father’s more traditional approach to running a studio. The well-researched book depicts the fierce competition among the major studios of the time—including MGM, Universal, and Warner—to create the latest hit in the transition from silent to talking films in the ’20s and ’30s. Stone creatively explores this vibrant time in American cinema from both the studio perspective, through Junior at Universal, and the actors’ viewpoints. The tale highlights Karloff’s frustrations and aspirations and Lugosi’s tempestuous nature. At one point, Lugosi muses about the Monster part: “Stars showed their faces to the world; they didn’t hide them under pounds of makeup! And they spoke—words and words of great dialogue, not grunts and groans like a dumb animal….No, the role of the Monster was not for him.” The classic immigrant story is also seamlessly woven into the narrative through these well-developed characters. The author showcases an easy, witty writing style that deftly balances the fast-paced, roaring Sunset Boulevard arena with the poignant contemplations of the engrossing tale’s players. Karloff desperately wants the Monster role. He “saw the Monster as a scared child—not some horrific brute, terrorizing and destroying for the sake of terrorizing and destroying, but a frightened being….This sympathetic interpretation resonated with Boris and gave him real hope that he could deliver a powerful performance, one that would put him on the map, once and for all.”
A compelling and thoughtful family drama delightfully wrapped up in Hollywood glamour.Pub Date: May 17, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-62634-931-5
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
Review Posted Online: May 13, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.
A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.
When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.
A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024
ISBN: 9781250178633
Page Count: 480
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023
PERSPECTIVES
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view.
The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies—fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain’s logbook, ink—are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship’s wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when “she” dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own “son”—Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist’s art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: “The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born—I began to suppose this—just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person.” Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, “Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?”
A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.Pub Date: Jan. 26, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-18887-3
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Riverhead
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2020
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