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
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.
A lively and unabashedly sentimental novel examines the impact of feminism on four upper-middle-class white women in a suburb of Washington, D.C., in 1963.
Transplanted Ohioan Margaret Ryan—married to an accountant, raising three young children, and decidedly at loose ends—decides to recruit a few other housewives to form a book club. She’s thinking A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, but a new friend, artistic Charlotte Gustafson, suggests Betty Friedan’s brand-new The Feminine Mystique. They’re joined by young Bitsy Cobb, who aspired to be a veterinarian but married one instead, and Vivian Buschetti, a former Army nurse now pregnant with her seventh child. The Bettys, as they christen themselves, decide to meet monthly to read feminist books, and with their encouragement of each other, their lives begin to change: Margaret starts writing a column for a women’s magazine; Viv goes back to work as a nurse; Charlotte and Bitsy face up to problems with demanding and philandering husbands and find new careers of their own. The story takes in real-life figures like the Washington Post’s Katharine Graham and touches on many of the tumultuous political events of 1963. Bostwick treats her characters with generosity and a heavy dose of wish-fulfillment, taking satisfying revenge on the wicked and solving longstanding problems with a few well-placed words, even showing empathy for the more well-meaning of the husbands. As historical fiction, the novel is hampered by its rosy optimism, but its take on the many micro- and macroaggressions experienced by women of the era is sound and eye-opening. Although Friedan might raise an eyebrow at the use her book’s been put to, readers will cheer for Bostwick’s spunky characters.
A sugarcoated take on midcentury suburbia.Pub Date: April 22, 2025
ISBN: 9781400344741
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Harper Muse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
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