When first met, 15-year-old Evie and her best friend are buying chocolate cigarettes to practice smoking. Philip Ardagh's Stinking Rich and Just Plain Stinky is published by Faber.Blundell, author of Star Wars novelizations, turns out a taut, noirish mystery/coming-of-age story set in 1947 it's easy to picture it as a film starring Lana Turner, who is mentioned in these pages. This book is not called Why I Lied, remember, but How. Her believable characters inhabit a very real world, and she chooses her words with care. I understand that you people are happier in the Miami area."īlundell is one to watch.
Having discovered they're Jewish, he asks them to leave: "We trusted that you were Gentile. At one stage, the hotel manager confronts some long-stay guests. At the end of a war in which six million Jews were murdered by those whom the likes of Joe fought, not all white people are equal under the star-spangled banner. But though Evie acknowledges this with a passing reference, Blundell has her sights set on something far more surprising to a young British readership: antisemitism. One might expect a novel concerned with society's injustices and set in 1950s America to centre on the segregation of black from white. Every era has its own conventions and dirty secrets, and she teases these out and weaves them into Evie's desire to step out of the shadow of her blonde bombshell mother.Īt the hotel, Evie is smitten by a fellow guest, Peter Coleridge, whose good looks, charm and sophistication win over the ladies - though not Joe, who was in the same army unit overseas. But where Blundell really scores is with the nuances and vagaries of the time.
There's talk of Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce.
The sense of period is nicely evoked and never overplayed. Evie's not in the photo because she doesn't fit the postwar fairytale. The headline ran: "And the dish ran away with the spoon". A photographer from Life magazine took a picture of them on the steps of City Hall. Joe and Bev married when Evie was nine, after GI Joe returned from the war. But Blundell, if not Evie, hints all may not be what it seems. The reason Evie is there with her mother, Beverly, and stepfather, Joe - in the rainy season, when those in the know give Palm Beach a wide berth - is an apparently spur-of-the-moment decision by Joe.
0 kommentar(er)
