A lively, insightful rendering of a celebrity’s coming-of-age in the Stork Club era.
A historical novel dramatizes the life of Oona O’Neill Chaplin, with a focus on her teen years in the 1940s in New York City and Hollywood.
In a prologue set in 1927, Oona, “not-quite-two-years,” reaches for her father, Eugene O’Neill, at a family photo shoot. He brushes her away. The story then jumps to Manhattan and Oona at 14. She lives in Greenwich Village with her divorced, distracted mother, Agnes, who has enrolled Oona in the tony Brearley School. Oona meets Carol Marcus, who attends Dalton, at dance class and is soon mostly residing in the Marcus family’s Park Avenue apartment. Carol introduces her to Gloria Vanderbilt, and the girls become popular among the cafe society set. Amid this attention, Oona yearns for more contact with her father, now living in California with his new wife and gatekeeper, Carlotta. Oona finally is allowed to visit but is allotted little time with the playwright, making the vacation, as she later tells Truman Capote, “terrible for a whole week, and then it was over.” She also helps Carol pursue William Saroyan, although Oona labels him a “jerk” and is wary of her own judgmental beau, J.D. Salinger. She then joins her mother, now living in a Hollywood trailer park, which leads to meeting Charlie Chaplin and, at 18, forging a lasting connection with the actor and director. Cain masterfully presents the emotionally neglected, financially shaky Oona as a striving hero whose focus on appearance is part of her battle armor. In a beautifully rendered sequence, Oona smashes a mirror, then “picked up the jagged pieces one by one...straightened her shoulders and got to work setting everything in order.” While her May-December relationship with Chaplin has had Freudian interpretations, the author offers more complexity here, including how Oona inspired the filmmaker’s masterpiece Limelight. Cain covers Oona’s post-marriage life in the book’s final quarter, but the teen years, perhaps inevitably, are the high point of this engaging novel.
A lively, insightful rendering of a celebrity’s coming-of-age in the Stork Club era.Pub Date: Jan. 3, 2023
ISBN: 9781949935615
Page Count: 470
Publisher: Orange Blossom Publishing
Review Posted Online: Dec. 16, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.
A lifetime’s worth of letters combine to portray a singular character.
Sybil Van Antwerp, a cantankerous but exceedingly well-mannered septuagenarian, is the titular correspondent in Evans’ debut novel. Sybil has retired from a beloved job as chief clerk to a judge with whom she had previously been in private legal practice. She is the divorced mother of two living adult children and one who died when he was 8. She is a reader of novels, a gardener, and a keen observer of human nature. But the most distinguishing thing about Sybil is her lifelong practice of letter writing. As advancing vision problems threaten Sybil’s carefully constructed way of life—in which letters take the place of personal contact and engagement—she must reckon with unaddressed issues from her past that threaten the house of cards (letters, really) she has built around herself. Sybil’s relationships are gradually revealed in the series of letters sent to and received from, among others, her brother, sister-in-law, children, former work associates, and, intriguingly, literary icons including Joan Didion and Larry McMurtry. Perhaps most affecting is the series of missives Sybil writes but never mails to a shadowy figure from her past. Thoughtful musings on the value and immortal quality of letters and the written word populate one of Sybil’s notes to a young correspondent while other messages are laugh-out-loud funny, tinged with her characteristic blunt tartness. Evans has created a brusque and quirky yet endearing main character with no shortage of opinions and advice for others but who fails to excavate the knotty difficulties of her own life. As Sybil grows into a delayed self-awareness, her letters serve as a chronicle of fitful growth.
An affecting portrait of a prickly woman.Pub Date: May 6, 2025
ISBN: 9780593798430
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 15, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.
A French art historian’s English-language fiction debut combines the story of a loving relationship between a grandfather and granddaughter with an enlightening discussion of art.
One day, when 10-year-old Mona removes the necklace given to her by her now-dead grandmother, she experiences a frightening, hour-long bout of blindness. Her parents take her to the doctor, who gives her a variety of tests and also advises that she see a psychiatrist. Her grandfather Henry tells her parents that he will take care of that assignment, but instead, he takes Mona on weekly visits to either the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, or the Centre Pompidou, where each week they study a single work of art, gazing at it deeply and then discussing its impact and history and the biography of its maker. For the reader’s benefit, Schlesser also describes each of the works in scrupulous detail. As the year goes on, Mona faces the usual challenges of elementary school life and the experiences of being an only child, and slowly begins to understand the causes of her temporary blindness. Primarily an amble through a few dozen of Schlesser’s favorite works of art—some well known and others less so, from Botticelli and da Vinci through Basquiat and Bourgeois—the novel would probably benefit from being read at a leisurely pace. While the dialogue between Henry and the preternaturally patient and precocious Mona sometimes strains credulity, readers who don’t have easy access to the museums of Paris may enjoy this vicarious trip in the company of a guide who focuses equally on that which can be seen and the context that can’t be. Come for the novel, stay for the introductory art history course.
A pleasant if not entirely convincing tribute to the power of art.Pub Date: Aug. 26, 2025
ISBN: 9798889661115
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Europa Editions
Review Posted Online: June 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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