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
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
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.
In 16th-century Madrid, a crypto-Jew with a talent for casting spells tries to steer clear of the Inquisition.
Luzia Cotado, a scullion and an orphan, has secrets to keep: “It was a game she and her mother had played, saying one thing and thinking another, the bits and pieces of Hebrew handed down like chipped plates.” Also handed down are “refranes”—proverbs—in “not quite Spanish, just as Luzia was not quite Spanish.” When Luzia sings the refranes, they take on power. “Aboltar cazal, aboltar mazal” (“A change of scene, a change of fortune”) can mend a torn gown or turn burnt bread into a perfect loaf; “Quien no risica, no rosica” (“Whoever doesn’t laugh, doesn’t bloom”) can summon a riot of foliage in the depths of winter. The Inquisition hangs over the story like Chekhov’s famous gun on the wall. When Luzia’s employer catches her using magic, the ambitions of both mistress and servant catapult her into fame and danger. A new, even more ambitious patron instructs his supernatural servant, Guillén Santángel, to train Luzia for a magical contest. Santángel, not Luzia, is the familiar of the title; he has been tricked into trading his freedom and luck to his master’s family in exchange for something he no longer craves but can’t give up. The novel comes up against an issue common in fantasy fiction: Why don’t the characters just use their magic to solve all their problems? Bardugo has clearly given it some thought, but her solutions aren’t quite convincing, especially toward the end of the book. These small faults would be harder to forgive if she weren’t such a beautiful writer. Part fairy tale, part political thriller, part romance, the novel unfolds like a winter tree bursting into unnatural bloom in response to one of Luzia’s refranes, as she and Santángel learn about power, trust, betrayal, and love.
Lush, gorgeous, precise language and propulsive plotting sweep readers into a story as intelligent as it is atmospheric.Pub Date: April 9, 2024
ISBN: 9781250884251
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 3, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
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