Category Archives: B

December 6, 2012 · 5:49 PM

Thoughts: Carry the One by Carol Anshaw (Green Carnation Prize Project)

Carry the One by Carol AnshawCarry the One
by Carry Anshaw
Published 2012 by Simon & Schuster
Read December 2012
253 pages

When Jodie contacted me about her idea to have a group of bloggers read the Green Carnation Prize* short-list, I didn’t hesitate before choosing Carol Anshaw’s Carry the One. Mostly because I had attempted to read the novel before, but I ended up setting it aside when I realized it just wasn’t the right time to read the book. The Green Carnation Prize project was a good excuse to give it another chance.

Warning: This post contains discussion of actual events in the novel. Some might call them spoilers. 

The Plot: After Carmen and Matt’s wedding, Olivia, Nick, Maude, Alice, and Jim drive off a little drunk and a little stoned. The car hits and kills a child, and Olivia, who was driving, is sent to jail. The book follows the characters’ lives over the next few decades of their lives.

Some thoughts:

  • Carry the One starts off with an epigram, a quote from a Gillian Welch song, as if to say, “Hello, this book is going to be very gay.”
  • I was struck by how the violence that occurs in the novel was connected to conservative arguments. The little girl is killed because Olivia is high on drugs. Message: drugs are bad. Nick’s nose is broken because “Everyone was tacitly deferring to some universal law that, while his daughter lay in the hospital morgue, a father was allowed to punch out the guy lounging around in the wedding dress” (p 18). Message: variant gender expression is bad. Carmen’s ear is destroyed while volunteering to help women safely access a clinic that performs abortions. Message: abortion is bad. Maybe this wasn’t the author’s intent, but it happened enough that I started to pay attention.
  • Also, by including the tragic car accident right after Alice and Maude have sex, Anshaw continues an unfortunate tradition of tragic car accidents “coincidentally” occurring after same-sex partners have sex. (Including the first YA book with LGBT content, I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip by John Donovan, wherein the main character’s dog is hit by a car after the MC has sex with his male friend.)
  • I’m interested in how Alice is the only character whose intimate moments are detailed for the reader. She is presented as a sexual object in a way that none of the other characters are.
  • I loved the relationship Carmen had with her sister Alice. This quote is probably my favorite in the entire book and definitely makes a top ten list somewhere: Carmen was always a little startled (and titillated) when Alice said things like this. She wasn’t sure if this was her sister’s way of being shocking, or if lesbians all talked this way among themselves. It always tripped her up. She used to imagine love between women as a languid extension of friendship. Something Virginia Woolf-ish involving tea and conversation and sofas and afternoon eliding into evening, a small lamp needing to be turned on, but left unlit. And so she was brought up short by Alice’s exhausting–even just to witness–passion for Maude, her desolation since Maude walked out of her life. (p. 63)
  • Carmen works in a women’s shelter and I was pleasantly surprised that one of the women had been abused by her female partner. Representations of survivors of same-sex violence are so rare, and the inclusion here didn’t seem forced, as if included just to make a point.
  • This is the second novel, after John Green’s fantastic The Fault in Our Stars, I’ve read this year where a character visits the Anne Frank House.
  • Time goes by quickly, with each chapter beginning without a note as to just how much time has passed. Usually this bothers me in books, but I found it easy enough to keep track based on the pop culture references and, more directly, characters’ mentions of time.
  • Alice gets mono–which the text frequently refers to as the KISSING DISEASE. Cause y’all know who she’d be kissing, amiright? It’s telling that in the same chapter, Alice tells Carmen she’s “reading all these cheesy dyke novels from the forties and fifties,” which she loves because “[t]hey’re like Greek tragedies. Everyone gets horribly punished in the end. Or they hang themselves with a belt over the steam pipe” (p. 152). Since Alice, Carmen, and Nick are named after tragic Opera characters…I got kind of nervous about where this was going.
  • And then, oh God, their mother dies right after Alice has sex. Alice, you should never have sex apparently because you KILL PEOPLE WITH YOUR LADY LOVE.

Grade: B-

Recommended: Despite some of the things I’ve said above, Carry the One is an engaging, well-written story that just so happens to use several tropes of LGBT fiction.

Green Carnation Prize Project participants:

*The Green Carnation Prize recognizes the best book of the year by a LGBT-identified author. 

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October 10, 2012 · 8:18 PM

TLC Book Tour: Love, In Theory by E. J. Levy

loveintheoryLove, in Theoryloveintheory
by E.J. Levy
Published September 2012 by University of Georgia Press
Copy received for review via publisher
Read October 2012
224 pages

When I finished reading Love, In Theory, I closed the book and thought, “Oh good God love is awful and everyone cheats and I want to hide under my bed forever.”

What I liked

  • Levy is a clever, witty writer, who frequently makes enjoyable puns.
  • I really like this quote, from the story “Gravity”

Whenever Richard meets his high school friends, people he pretended to know because friends were necessary as clothes–they make it less embarrassing to go out in public–he feels a twinge of self-consciousness, an embarrassed moment when he finds himself wondering what they know about his life now. It’s not that he’s ashamed about the fact that he is gay, quite to the contrary, he imagines rather fatuously that this preference marks him out, makes him part of a lineage of Baldwin and Wilde, Shakespeare and Socrates, confirms some long-held but vaguely and never quite articulated sense that he is different from the others, born for some remarkable end, which he is only now beginning to suspect he is not. (p. 159)

  • All of the stories provide thought-provoking, if not always pleasant, ideas about love and loss and the idea that what we think we want isn’t always what we need.

What didn’t work for me

  • I couldn’t connect with any of the characters, and it’s not like I have never been hurt or fallen out of love.
  • Of the three stories that feature gay men (or, in “My Life In Theory,” a straight-identified man who has an affair with another man), one has AIDS, one realizes that he is only attracted to another man because he reminds him of himself, and one can’t stop cheating on his partner. Basically a bunch of stereotypes.
  • Maybe I’m just not smart enough to understand stories (mostly) about middle- to upper-middle-class professors.

Grade: B-
Recommended: Best if you enjoy the heartbreache-y elements of literary fiction. I think this collection would also be really good for book clubs.

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September 19, 2012 · 8:49 AM

Review: Starting From Here by Lisa Jenn Bigelow


Starting From Here
by Lisa Jenn Bigelow
Published 2012 by Amazon Children’s Publishing
Review copy won via Goodreads First Reads giveaway
Read August 2012
282 pages

I broke one of my very strict reading rules by entering the giveaway for this book. The blurb for Starting From Here starts off with:

Sixteen-year-old Colby Bingham’s heart has been broken too many times. Her mother is dead, her truck driver father is always away, and her almost girlfriend just dumped her for a guy.

Normally any mention of a) a dead mom, b) a newly straight ex-girlfriend and, to a lesser extent, c) an absent dad, is enough to send me running for the hills. Or clicking over to a different book page on Goodreads. You know, whatever fits the circumstances. I’m the girl who gets text messages from friends letting me know when the books they are reading contain any mention of Mom Death (MD), even if I’ve never mentioned any intent to read those books. You could say that I’m a bit more sensitive about that topic than your average Jill.

Based on that, I probably should have passed on this little book. The thing was, uh, I really liked the cover? (I have the best reasons for choosing books.) So I entered the giveaway and I won and I read it and, luckily, I only cried a little.

There is a lot more to Colby’s story than the death of her mother–I’ll get to that in a minute–but I want to talk a bit about the way that loss is presented in this book. The struggle with the grief and absolute awfulness of losing your mother as a teenager as described in Starting From Here is amazingly realistic and  honest. For instance, Colby didn’t come out to her mother before she died , and when Colby has this conversation after she starts to date a new girl:

“Well, congratulations, Colby. You deserve a nice girl.”

“A nice girl,” I repeated. “Who are you, my mother?”

The words just slipped out, and I felt a little jolt in my gut, like an elevator dropping two inches. I wanted to believe that Mom would like Amelia. I wanted to believe she’d be cheering for me, too. But I didn’t know–and I never would. (p. 185)

I maaaaay have teared up a bit there. The mentions of her mom and the pain of missing her were the highlight of the novel for me, partly because they bear a resemblance to my own experience, but mostly because they capture those emotions so well.

The real focus of Starting From Here is Colby’s relationships with her father, who is absent most days of the week for his long-distance trucking job, and Mo, a stray dog she adopts after she saves him when Mo is hit by a car. Through taking care of Mo, Colby begins the healing process and meets her new love interest, Amelia. Colby’s best friend, Van, is struggling with being a constant baby-sitter for his nephew and trying to have a social life. The Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) at Colby’s school is planning a dance. Oh, and Colby also has a complicated friendship with the local veterinarian, who has marital problems.

Needless to say, there’s a lot going on here, and it takes away from the best parts of the book: the handling of grief after Colby’s mom’s death, father/daughter relationships, and Colby’s rediscovery of herself through Max and Amelia and Van. The writing is stilted at points and sometimes reminded me of the writing you might find in an early 1990s YA book, but overall, I was satisfied and glad I took a chance on a book with the dreaded Mom Death.

Grade: B

Recommended: Particularly for the deft handling of Post-MD emotions, but also as a solid YA novel with a variety of LGBT characters. Oh, and there’s an endearing dog who doesn’t die.

(Many thanks to Tasha for reading a draft of this post and keeping me from deleting it, as I often do when I write things.)

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June 3, 2012 · 4:02 PM

Review & Giveaway: The Letter Q edited by Sarah Moon

The Letter Q: Queer Writers’ Notes to Their Younger Selves
Edited by Sarah Moon with contributing editor James Lecesne
Published 2012 by Arthur A. Levine Books (imprint of Scholastic)
Hardcover received for review from the publisher
Read May 2012
281 pages

Summary From Publisher: In this anthology, sixty-four award-winning authors and illustrators such as Michael Cunningham, Amy Bloom, Jacqueline, Woodson, Terrence McNally, Gregory Maguire, David Levithan, and Armistead Maupin, make imaginative journeys into their pasts, telling their younger selves what they would have liked to know then about their lives as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people. Through stories, in pictures, with bracing honesty, these are words of love, messages of understanding, reasons to hold on for the better future ahead. They will tell you things about your favorite authors that you never knew before. And they will tell you about yourself.

Sixty four LGBT writers contributed to this anthology! If that doesn’t help you realize that We Are Everywhere, I don’t know what will.

If someone were to write a heartbreaking YA novel about me, they’d set it in my sixteenth year, the year my mother died and I started realizing I might be gay and Everything Changed Forever. So maybe it’s a little understandable when I tell you that the idea of writing to my sixteen year-old self is overwhelming. Oh, to swoop in on teenage me and let her know she makes it out of that terrible house, that terrible town, finds love, and spends her spare time writing a book blog and “entertaining” friends with Nixon facts.

As an adult, reading The Letter Q was more a thought experiment into what I’d say to teenage me than the stated intent of an anthology marketed to teens to remind them that, well, it gets better.  I certainly can’t argue with that message.

I do have to point out that although the summary and the jacket copy mention that the authors are “telling their younger selves what they would have liked to know then about their lives as lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender people,” not a single contributor overtly mentions their experience as a trans person.

At its best, The Letter Q is an excellent companion anthology to Dan Savage and Terry Miller’s It Gets Better, and for those of us who are no longer teenagers, it’s a great mental exercise in “how could I help my teenage self?”

“How are you going to mail a letter to twenty years ago?” she said.
“I don’t know, ” I told her, finishing the sentence on the page. “But wouldn’t it be terrible, the day comes we learn how to ship something back in time, and we’ve got nothing to send? So first I thought I’d get the package ready. Next I’ll worry about the postage.”
How many times had I said to myself, it’s too bad I didn’t know this at age ten, if only I had learned that at twelve, what a waste to understand, twenty years late!
–p 24, The Bridge Across Forever by Richard Bach

Okay, I admit, Richard Bach has absolutely no connection to The Letter Q other than the coincidental circumstance wherein I am reading The Bridge Across Forever and I came across this quote and it seemed fitting.

Favorite Quote (From The Letter Q this time): 

You see, love doesn’t end despair. It deepens the poignancy of it by opening your eyes to what there is to lose. — p. 59, Adam Haslett

Grade: B-

Suggested further reading:  It Gets Better edited by Dan Savage and Terry Miller; How Beautiful the Ordinary: Twelve Stories of Identity edited by Michael Cart; Am I Blue? Coming Out From the Silence edited by Marion Dane Bauer

Giveaway!

Scholastic has kindly offered to give two people copies of The Letter Q and an “It Gets Better” t-shirt beneffiting the It Gets Better Project! To enter, just fill out this Google form. Winners will be announced June 10th! (Sorry, this giveaway is U.S. only.)

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September 28, 2011 · 2:00 PM

Review: Tension City by Jim Lehrer

Tension City: Inside the Presidential Debates, from Kennedy-Nixon to Obama-McCain
by Jim Lehrer
Published 2011 by Random House
Ebook received for review from publisher via Netgalley
Read September 2011
224 pages

Why I Read This Book: Although this book was featured at BEA and I wanted to pick up a copy, it didn’t quite work out that way. In fact I didn’t even realize it was on Netgalley until I did a search on there for “Nixon.” Because that’s how I roll. (I’m currently having a read-all-about-Nixon thing; see my Nixon Reading List.)

The Nixon Connection: Since the Nixon part of the title is what initially drew me to the book, I feel like I should take a moment to mention the quality of the, uh, Nixon content. It’s rather lack luster, mostly a paragraph or two about how folks who watched the Nixon-Kennedy debate on television thought Kennedy won and how those who listened to the debate on the radio thought Nixon won. It brings nothing new to the table.

The rest of it: Jim Lehrer has moderated eleven presidential candidate debates, so many that Bernard Shaw has called him The Dean of Moderators*. In Tension City, Lehrer reflects on the history of the debates as well as his own time moderating them.

As might be expected, the book is most vivid and engaging when Lehrer is discussing his own experience; this section of the book reads as a memoir, complete with behind-the-scenes information and reflection. When Lehrer writes about historical debates that he was not a part of, however, the narration sags under the weight of Lehrer’s obvious boredom with events of which he was not involved.

Tension City tries at once to be both history and memoir and suffers for it. If Lehrer had focused on his own memories of the debates he moderated and his discussions with the presidential candidates, Tension City would be a great book. Instead, it’s a decent read with some interesting tidbits.

Grade: B-
Recommended if you like: Memoirs, insider-tales, journalism, politics

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September 9, 2011 · 9:17 AM

Review: Women of the Mean Streets edited by J.M. Redmann & Greg Herren

 Women of the Mean Streets
edited by J.M. Redmann and Greg Herren
Published August 2011 by Bold Strokes Books
E-Galley received for review from publisher via Netgalley
Read July 2011
288 pages

According to the synopsis, Women of the Mean Streets is “an anthology of some of the top, tough women crime writers today, noir stories with a lesbian twist.” The thing is, some of the stories, like ”Den of Iniquity” by Lori L. Lake, that are missing the “lesbian twist.” There are about three of these stories in the collection, and two of them are about sexual violence (the other suggests that sexual violence was an issue). I found that interesting, if a bit frustrating.

Some of my favorite stories in the collection:

“A.R.M. and the Woman” by Laura Lippman

  • Summary: After divorcing her husband, Sally Holt is shocked to find that she needs to come up with one million dollars in order to keep her house. When her attempts at finding a man to take care of her (well, of the money) don’t work out, she turns to a lonely housewife named Lynette.
  • Reaction: I’m not going to lie, I was pleasantly surprised to see a story by Laura Lippman included in this collection. Sally’s manipulation of Lynette is awe-inspiring, if you ever felt like being a criminal mastermind.

“The Economics of Desire: A Cautionary Tale” by  Jeane Harris

  • Summary: There are four interlocking vignettes in this story, featuring women who are being taken for all their worth by the women they think love them.
  • Reaction:
“I pointed that out. She said it’s called ‘change,” which we would know if we ever left the house. She said all we do is sit on our patio and barbecue.”
“We do so change. We went to San Francisco last year instead of Pronvincetown. That’s change.” (p. 59)
This story really brought on the giggles. I’m a terrible person.

“Some Kind of Killing” by Miranda Kent

  • Reaction: This was one of those stories where there actually isn’t a lesbian involved–the main character is a thirteen-year-old girl who may or may not have slain her whole family–but it may be the best written of all the stories in the collection. It’s definitely the creepiest. It kind of makes me shudder just thinking about it. Certainly the sign of a good story, no?

Despite the outlying stories that didn’t quite fit within the guidelines of the anthology, Women of the Mean Streets was both entertaining and creepy, as all good noir should be.

Grade: B

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August 10, 2011 · 7:24 AM

REVIEW: Gemini Bites by Patrick Ryan

Gemini Bites
by Patrick Ryan
Published March 2011 by Scholastic Press
Borrowed from Library
240 pages
Read June 2011

Guess what? This book features TWINS! I bet you never would have guessed. Judy and Kyle Renneker are part of the rather large Renneker brood, and they don’t get along at all. Judy is suddenly Very Religious has been attending Bible study sessions–but unbeknownst to her family, it’s all an act so she can flirt with a cute guy. Judy’s been giving Kyle, who recently came out (to very accepting parents), a particularly rough time, capitalizing on her “religiousness” to take out her anger on her brother (for something unrelated to being gay).

Amid this sibling rivalry, the Parents Renneker have offered to let GARRET JOHNSON stay at the house for a month so he can finish up the school year before having to move. Yes, THAT Garret Johnson that you heard about in biology class–the creepy one who may or may not be a VAMPIRE. And you know what vampires will do, right? LEAVE TWO IDENTICAL MARKS WHEN THEY BITE YOU! Oh, it’s too much to handle, I know. Once Garrett moves in, Judy and Kyle both develop crushes on him, and the real battle of the twins gets going: who will get him? And will they follow him into the AFTERLIFE?

Gemini Bites is not a book that works well when summarized. It sounds campy and ridiculous–but it’s actually an original, funny, endearing book about first love and the strains of sibling rivalry.

SPOILER ALERT From the beginning, it’s pretty clear that there are no real vampires in the world of Gemini Bites, but Ryan manages to keep you guessing anyhow, which I appreciated. When all is revealed at the end, you don’t feel let down as much as amused that you could have possibly thought vampires could be real. END SPOILER

Gemini Bites is my favorite LGBTQ young adult novel that I have read this year. Do yourself a favor and pick this one up.

Grade: B+
Recommended: To fans of YA novels
Also recommended: Ryan’s 2009 book In Mike We Trust, another great read.

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July 25, 2011 · 9:08 AM

Review: Firestorm by Radclyffe

Firestorm (A First Responders Novel)
by Radclyffe
Published July 2011 by Bold Strokes Books
Ebook received for review from publisher via Netgalley
Read July 2011

Note: This is a romance novel and I can’t write about it without mentioning the sex scenes.

I don’t often read romance novels. I do, however, have a history with them: I used to sneak my aunt’s Harlequin novels when I was in middle school, and in high school I was really into the Helen Fielding/Jane Green/Jennifer Weiner school of romance–but once I got to college and was all “Oh, right, gay,” I stopped reading romance out of pure necessity.

Lesbian romance novels seemed to follow a singular, frustrating pattern: girl meets girl; girls share soft, loving kisses and fall in love; some jerk-off attacks them in a homophobic rage; girls break up; girls get back together after much hand-wringing over the difficulties of being ho-mo-sexuals. This isn’t to say that all lesbian romance novels are like this, because I definitely didn’t read widely within the genre (after two or three cringe-inducing books, I gave them up entirely) but the ones I read definitely didn’t inspire me to read further.

So what made me read Firestorm, a lesbian romance by one of the most prolific authors of the genre? I was suddenly, after like 10 years, in the mood to read ROMANCE*. I may or may not have downloaded and read a Harlequin novel on my nook (ahem) and I may or may not have also downloaded and read a  Jennifer Crusie** novel (ahem), both of which may have been entertaining (the Crusie novel much more so) but ultimately they didn’t make me feel all romancey***, because while I might want to meet a handsome cowboy and ride off into the sunset, he’d be a tiny bit different from the one I found in that Harlequin book. So, when I came across Firestorm as I was browsing Netgalley’s Gay & Lesbian section, I decided to give it a go.

So basically, Mallory is the head smokejumper, which is like a SUPER firefighter, ie lots of DANGER. This is her first year as commander of the SUPER FIREFIGHTER crew and she is very nervous about it because last year her jumping partner died during a rescue mission and Mallory blames herself. She has 30 days to make sure the new recruits are prepared to be awesome SUPER FIREFIGHTERS (and not die). She hand picked her team, but then Jac Russo shows up and makes her angry but not too angry because Jac is really hot. Obviously.

I am pleased to report that Firestorm veered away from what I will call the Classic Lesbian Romance Plot (CLRP) enough to be quite enjoyable. The sex scenes did suffer from the Simultatious Orgasm issue that is also a problem with Harlequin etc romance novels, but they are otherwise well-written. There is a subplot involving Jac’s father who is an Ultra-Conservative politician running for president, ie not friendly to the gays, but it’s handled well and doesn’t become over the top. I also didn’t mind it because it gave Jac an excuse to put her Army dress blues on, and I am very okay with that.

Would it be in bad form to swoon during a review? I kind of want to swoon.

I’d recommend this to anyone looking for an enjoyable, well-written lady romance.

Grade: B

*I blame Sarah Wendell and her awesome speech at the Book Blogger convention.

**I blame the ever-so-convincing Linda Holmes.

***I don’t mean this in a gross way.

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February 14, 2011 · 5:53 PM

Review: The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith

The Price of Salt
by Patricia Highsmith
Published 1952 by Coward-McCann
Own–purchased at a local independent bookstore
Joint read with Amy for the GLBT(Q) Challenge

The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith is the first of the read-a-longs Amy and I plan to do for the GLBT(Q) challenge. I placed it on the list because from what I know of Highsmith, she seems like a very, uh, interesting person. In the first few chapters of The Talented Miss Highsmith, a biography published in 2010, I learned that she kept detailed records of her relationships and sexual activities, scoring each woman on a scale of 1-10 on various topics. (That list has survived until this day, and it’s awesome.) The Price of Salt is generally considered to be FAKE SPOILER the first lesbian book to have a happy ending, and since I find books with gay characters that have happy endings to be all too rare, I put it on the list.

Amy visited me in Boston this weekend, and instead of writing a real review, we made a vlog.

 

Grade: B

Cass and Amy give it an "OKAY"

Recommended: Despite some truly 50s style occurrences (like SPOILER ALERT a private detective with an impressive array of listening devices), The Price of Salt is surprisingly modern in its portrayal of Therese and Carol’s relationship and the presentation of sexual fluidity. Recommended if you like classics, this book is a good way to round out your knowledge of the history of LGBTQ fiction.

 

You can read Amy’s much more detailed review at her blog.

 

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January 12, 2011 · 5:39 PM

Review: The Bad and the Beautiful by Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair

Over the next month or so, I will be reading and reviewing several books about early Hollywood. I'm calling them my "Tinsel Town Reviews."

 

The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood In the Fifties
by Sam Kashner and Jennifer MacNair
Published 2002 by W. W. Norton & Company
Borrowed from the library
380 pages

I absolutely adored Sam Kashner’s most recently published book, Furious Love: Elizabeth Taylor, Richard Burton, and the Marriage of the Century (co-written with Nancy Schoenberger), which ignited in me a new interest in the movies of Taylor and Burton, as well as the pre-1980s era of a Hollywood. When I saw he had written The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood In the Fifties–which captures the era through chapters on significant events, relationships, and scandals–I thought it would be a great way to get an overview of the decade from an author I enjoyed. And while at times the The Bad and the Beautiful overreaches in an attempt to cover ten years of eventful movie-making, it proved overall to be an entertaining, if overly ambitious, read. The following are a few of the book’s notable moments.

Rock Hudson is mostly remembered today for being one of the first gay male celebrities to succumb to AIDS in the 1980s, but in the 1950s he was the image of virile masculinity. Of course, the 1950s in the US being what they were, Hudson went to great lengths to prevent the public from discovering the truth about his sexuality. Kashner and MacNair detail that when Hudson lived with a man, he would have two telephone lines, one of which his boyfriend was not allowed to answer to ensure no one would find out they were cohabiting. I found tidbits like this intriguing, but not necessarily illuminating. Certain details of Rock Hudson’s life could (and do) fill entire books, and ultimately, I found this brief chapter too insubstantial to be fully engaging.

Another chapter that followed this “intrigue with too few details” theme was about the relationship between Sammy Davis Jr., and actress Kim Novak. Black men dating white women, no matter how famous the black man may have been, was simply not accepted by society in 1950s America (and was illegal in 22 states). Kashner and MacNair contend that Novak was the love of Davis’ life, but warnings of career ruination from studio directors forced the two to end their not-so-secret relationship. The brief paragraphs explaining this situation only managed to whet my appetite for the social and cultural implications of the relationship, as well as more information on Sammy Davis Jr.’s life.

The Bad and the Beautiful is at its best when tackling minor subjects (as opposed to mega-watt stars like Rock Hudson and Sammy Davis Jr.), as I discovered in the chapter on Peyton Place: the novel, its author, and the film adaptation of the book. Published in 1956, Peyton Place was written by a poor housewife from New England named Grace Metalious. The book was a sensation, selling in outrageous numbers and stirring the movie industry to clamor for the movie rights. They promised her she could “write the script” (only not really) and brought her out to Hollywood, where she at least got to hang out with celebrities for a little while. It’s an interesting subject not only because of the phenomenon that Peyton Place the movie (and later the TV show) became, but also because it explores the effects that sexism and classism had on the author and her family. The chapter really succeeds because the scope of the subject fits the scope of the chapter.

In summary, I loved the topic and the writing in The Bad and the Beautiful: Hollywood In the Fifties, but the lack of detail was frustrating. A worthy read for an overview of the decade, but I’ll definitely need to read more on the specific people, movies, and books mentioned within it to feel truly satisfied with my knowledge of the era and its stars.
Grade: B

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