It’s 1942 and
twice-widowed Ellie Hogan’s teenaged son Leo has run away from boarding school.
It doesn’t take much sleuthing to find out that he’s taken the train across
country from New York to Los Angeles: to Hollywood. He’s determined that he will be a
star. Ellie immediately jumps on a train and follows him, to discover him
living with another young man, Freddie, who is trying to become the world’s
first actor’s agent, and Freddie’s girlfriend, Crystal, who fancies herself a
starlet. They are holed up at the Chateau Marmont, with little money and no
jobs. Ellie allows herself to be convinced that Leo has a real chance at
getting a part in an upcoming film, so she takes a room for herself and Leo and
figures it’ll only be a few days before this nonsense is out of the way and
they can head home. To her surprise, Leo gets a part and is put into acting
classes at the studio. Stuck in California for the time being, Ellie rents a house
and sends for her younger son, Tom, and her aging friend and housekeeper,
Bridie, and settles in for a few months while the film is being shot. She ends
up taking in Freddie and Crystal, mothering them just like she does her sons,
even though this means they have taken over the room she’d designated as her
artist’s studio. For Ellie, being a mother is the most important thing in her
life- she admits that she married her second husband in large part so she could
be a mother to his son Leo. She is willing to put her own life- both
professional and personal- on hold for her sons, feeling that she doesn’t have
enough time or love to go around. Whether this means quashing a relationship
that seems to have a lot of potential or giving up her painting, she’s fine
with it.
Ellie acts like
a very entitled woman. She barges in everywhere and expects everyone to listen
to her, whether it be a studio executive or the military head of a relocation
camp where a Japanese friend of hers is interned. She comes by this trait not
from being born into money; she worked her way up from nothing during the
Depression. She just feels she has to do her best to try and help her friends
and family- even when she doesn’t have all the information and they desperately
do not want her to intervene.
The book jacket
makes the story sound exciting: it mentions glamour and glitz and having to
protect her family from the threat of the war. In reality, Ellie encounters the
glitz only occasionally, and the war is little threat to her family, although
her own actions make things difficult for both her Polish born boyfriend and
her Japanese friend. The story really doesn’t have much action in it. Told by
Ellie in the year 1950, a lot of it is backstory (this book is the third in a
trilogy) and her emotions and thoughts. I found I could not get really
interested in the book; I couldn’t make a connection with Ellie or any of the
other characters. They were flat and not fleshed out. Bridie as the Irish
housekeeper was very nearly a stereotype. I found myself impatient with the
book, wanting to get it read and have it over with so I could go on to
something more interesting There is also a (small) problem with some
anachronistic language – ‘networking’ and ‘lifestyle’ weren’t used in 1950 that
I know of- but that may have been fixed in the final edit.
I received this book free in exchange for an honest review.
The above is an affiliate link. If you click through and buy something, Amazon will give me a few cents.
Neither of these things affected my review.
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