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
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.
Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II.
In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. This trajectory is interrupted when she receives an invitation to return to France to attend a ceremony honoring passeurs: people who aided the escape of others during the war. Cut to spring, 1940: Viann has said goodbye to husband Antoine, who's off to hold the Maginot line against invading Germans. She returns to tending her small farm, Le Jardin, in the Loire Valley, teaching at the local school and coping with daughter Sophie’s adolescent rebellion. Soon, that world is upended: The Germans march into Paris and refugees flee south, overrunning Viann’s land. Her long-estranged younger sister, Isabelle, who has been kicked out of multiple convent schools, is sent to Le Jardin by Julien, their father in Paris, a drunken, decidedly unpaternal Great War veteran. As the depredations increase in the occupied zone—food rationing, systematic looting, and the billeting of a German officer, Capt. Beck, at Le Jardin—Isabelle’s outspokenness is a liability. She joins the Resistance, volunteering for dangerous duty: shepherding downed Allied airmen across the Pyrenees to Spain. Code-named the Nightingale, Isabelle will rescue many before she's captured. Meanwhile, Viann’s journey from passive to active resistance is less dramatic but no less wrenching. Hannah vividly demonstrates how the Nazis, through starvation, intimidation and barbarity both casual and calculated, demoralized the French, engineering a community collapse that enabled the deportations and deaths of more than 70,000 Jews. Hannah’s proven storytelling skills are ideally suited to depicting such cataclysmic events, but her tendency to sentimentalize undermines the gravitas of this tale.
Still, a respectful and absorbing page-turner.Pub Date: Feb. 3, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-312-57722-3
Page Count: 448
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Nov. 19, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2014
BOOK TO SCREEN
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.
A dramatic, complex imagining of the origins of Stonehenge.
In about 2500 B.C.E. on the Great Plain, Seft and his family collect flints in a mine. He dislikes the work, and the motherless lad hates the abuse he gets from his father and brothers. He leaves them and arrives at a wooden monument where sacred events such as the Midsummer Rite take place. There are also circles of stones that help predict equinoxes, solstices, even eclipses. This is a world where the customary greeting is “May the Sun God smile on you,” and everyone is a year older on Midsummer Day. Except for a priestess or two, no one can count beyond fingers and toes—to indicate 30, they show both hands, point to both feet, then show both hands again. Casual sex is common, and sex between women is less common but not taboo. Joia, a young woman who becomes a priestess, wonders about her sexuality. After a fire destroys the Monument, she leads a bold effort to rebuild it in stone. To please the gods, they must haul 10 giant stones from distant Stony Valley. Of course neither machinery nor roads exist, so the difficulties are extraordinary. Although the project has its detractors, hundreds of able-bodied people are willing to help. Craftspeople known as cleverhands construct a sled and a road, and they make the rope to wrap around the stones. Many, many others pull. And pull. Meanwhile, the three principal groups—farmers, woodlanders, and herders—all have their separate interests. There is talk of war, which Joia has never seen in her lifetime. Soon it seems inevitable that the powerful farmers will not only start one but win it, unless heroes like Seft and Joia can come up with a creative plan. But there is also the matter of love for Joia in this well-plotted and well-told yarn. The story has a lot of characters from multiple tribes, and they can be hard to keep track of. A page in the front of the book listing who’s who would be helpful.
Vintage Follett. His fans will be pleased.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9781538772775
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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