This fictionalized story is about one of Hollywood’s
biggest silent film stars (Colleen Moore), on whom the three movies entitled A
Star is Born are based.
Yes,
it’s rags to riches for Doreen O’Dare, a determined teenager who follows her
dream and makes it to the top, but who also sees the writing on the wall with
the transition to talkies. She’s been sharp
about her money, and changes course to follow another dream--making it to the
top again, this time her way.
In
the process, Rooney reveals fascinating details about the making of silent
films-- how actors and directors grew up with the industry, learning as they
went, not always knowing what they were doing, little fish often surpassing big
fish. And of her sad love story with a
publicity genius who makes her a star but can’t keep up with her.
The
parallel narrative is how her love of miniatures and for her Irish grandmother, who yes, does believe in fairies, leads her to create a gigantic Fairy Castle,
which becomes a fund-raising vehicle that makes her as influential in the 1930s
as she was in the Jazz Age.
A
tale of determination, talent, taste, independence, and influence, with a
generous coating of fairy dust. A
delightful read.
From the bestselling author of Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk comes a novel about Hollywood, the cost of stardom, and selfless second acts, inspired by an extraordinary true story.
Chicago, 1916. Doreen O'Dare is fourteen years old when she hops a Hollywood-bound train with her beloved Irish grandmother. Within a decade, her trademark bob and insouciant charm make her the preeminent movie flapper of the Jazz Age. But her success story masks one of relentless ambition, tragedy, and the secrets of a dangerous marriage.
Her professional life in flux, Doreen trades one dream for another. She pours her wealth and…
Yes, there’s a murder, but that’s only part of
the mystery. This ingeniously constructed story is of Bodie
Kane, a guilt-racked star of a popular podcast who’s asked to return to her
high school campus after 20 years to teach a short-term class.
The boarding
school is also where her long-ago roommate was killed, a quickly resolved crime
pinned on a peripheral employee who is still incarcerated. Yet, the murder has
continued to capture the imagination of the public when it gets “reported on”
repeatedly over the years as media coverage proliferates of real crimes
involving beautiful young white women victims.
Though Bodie was a quiet nerd in high school,
her career has taught her a lot about getting to the bottom of a story, and she
uses that sleuth-like knowledge to stir things up by asking the titled questions
and inspiring her students, who take on the closed case as their podcast
subject.
The arc of the story moves painstakingly back
and forth upon itself as it reviews new evidence, old memories, multiple points
of view and hearsay from many characters as Bodie and her squad leave no stone
unturned-- even the damming fact that no one asked her at the time--the one
she’s certain points to the real killer.
In the process, the story becomes less
a whodunit than a deep dive into a swirling gyre of assumptions, collusion,
cover-ups, and society’s sordid preoccupation with women and violence as Bodie
searches for answers in her adolescent past, to make sense out of her adult
present. It keeps going until all the questions - about the criminal and the
complicit - have finally been answered.
The riveting new novel from the author of The Great Believers, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past: the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the 1995 murder of a classmate, Thalia Keith. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia's death and the conviction of the school's athletics coach, Omar Evans, are the subject of intense fascination online, Bodie prefers-needs-to let sleeping dogs lie.
This perfectly titled tale of a bucket-list
trip that ends up down a very deep rabbit hole delivers on its promise.
Even
for a non-thriller reader, it kept me up late turning pages--there was simply no
pause in the action and continually side-switching intrigue. It will leave you
dizzy, enthralled, and either dying to hightail it to Cuba and fill yourself
with rum or definitely scratching both off your own bucket list.
It will also
leave you surprisingly touched as narrator Tanner, a self-described loser in
life, gets his sea legs in both love and life. The ending will blow your mind.
A young woman is compelled to make a decision that only the men of her time were forced to make: In 1969, as mounting tensions over the Vietnam War are dividing America, a young woman in college on an Army scholarship risks future and family to secretly join the anti-war counterculture and is ultimately forced to make a life-altering choice as fateful as that of any male Lottery draftee.
