Back in old Hollywood for this week’s BotW. It might have taken me a couple of weeks to actually get time to properly sit down and get into this, but once I did, it was worth it.
As I mentioned in my post about this on release day, this tells the story of Eileen Sullivan who made her way to Hollywood via Chicago as a 14 year old chaperoned by her grandmother where she became a silent movie star with the stage name Doreen O’Dare. When the reader meets her, it’s the 1960s and she’s on her way to a museum in Chicago where a dolls house she created is on display. The model then jumps backwards and forwards between Doreen’s early life and film career and her conversations with the museum curator about her dolls house which she built during the Depression to house her collection of miniatures and toured it around the country.
Doreen/Eileen and her dolls house are based on the real life silent movie star Colleen Moore – at least in terms of the Hollywood career, dolls house and some aspects of her later life. I didn’t know anything about Moore before I read the book – and was astonished when I went to read up afterwards how much of the story was based on truth. This is my first book by Kathleen Rooney and I enjoyed the writing style as well as the Old Hollywood setting. It’s hard to tell how you’d find this if you did know more about stars of silent movies, but given that I’m fairly into stuff like this and didn’t know anything about her – despite the fact that it turns out that she’s credited with popularising the bob (and in the pictures it’s basically Phryne’s bob) – I reckon people who do know about her may be in the minority!
So I would rate this as well worth a read if you liked Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and want more movie stars – even if this has less twists and secrets, and is set in a different time. It also has the added bonus of being in Kindle Unlimited, although my copy came via NetGalley .
Happy Reading!
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 