Slim plot, but film fans will adore it.
Glamour-packed first novel by journalist Sherrill (The Buddha from Brooklyn, 2000) about a big-name Hollywood interviewer writing her last profile of a movie star.
Clementine James has written a 20,000-word essay on Erich von Stroheim for Flame magazine that her editor butchers down to 5,000 words. She quits movie biz. But Allegra Coleman, who has made only three movies (the latest being a remake of Antonioni's L’Avventura), demands Clem interview her. Flame offers Clem triple pay. Sticking to Allegra for a week between shoots, Clem sees her as an airhead filled with Buddhist philosophy and the usual narcissistic chatter about acting. Allegra believes she’s a rising star now because the energy of the universe declares it. On Interstate 5, Allegra, at the wheel, keeps eye contact with Clem. Then a crash costs Clem her right eye, while Allegra, for unknown reasons, walks away from the totaled car (read: James Dean’s Porsche) and disappears. As months go by, Allegra is nominated for an Oscar for Sphinxa and suddenly rises into the postmortal heavens of Marilyn Monroe and James Dean, with the public holding candlelight vigils in the Hollywood Bowl. Now Flame, planning an all-Allegra issue, really wants Clem’s Allegra profile. Meanwhile, in the hospital Clem is promised a newly invented Bio-eye from Switzerland. When she’s released, her eye-patch makes her as famous as Allegra and she’s chased by reporters. She goes about interviewing more people tied to Allegra, although not definitely writing the Flame article. That much of the novel has suspense, but Sherrill now lapses into big walk-ons from dead stars who invade Clem’s dreams and have a schizoid daylight reality for her as she goes about LA and Manhattan. These historical figures leave the plot limp for long passages until dozens of them gather at a Hollywood swimming pool in an explosion of chat, beauty, and sighs from oblivion. But where’s Allegra?
Slim plot, but film fans will adore it.Pub Date: Feb. 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-375-50769-8
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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