Taylor Jenkins Reid

What I loved best about this book was all the real human emotion. Ben and Elsie have just married when he is killed suddenly - and then Elsie is dealing with a mother-in-law who doesn't even know about her. Discovering that Susan (Ben's mother) also lost her husband to cancer and is grieving herself just added to the sense of tragedy. Watching both women come to terms with their grief - and the fact that after the initial hostility, Susan becomes something of a mentor in the journey of grief - all that was heartbreaking and beautiful at the same time.… (mer)

"Our family histories are simply stories... They are mths we create about the people who came before us in order to make sense of ourselves".
This is a family drama, moving back and forth in time to explore the dynamic that created the relationship between parents and siblings.

Nina, the oldest sibling is the family "caretaker", is constantly trying to outrun her family dysfunction.
"Maybe we are free the moment we're born. Maybe everything we've ever done is by our own hands."
This revelation is the central conflict for Nina.
As she learns to 'declare independence' the other family members must learn to interact without her mediation.
Do the siblings want to reconnect with estranged family members? Can they work out conflicts? Can they act like the grownups they need to be?
"What broken family- no matter how shattered or bruised beyond recognition- does not ache to be reunited? What child, no matter how lost or abandoned does not ache to be loved?"

I enjoyed the story, character development, and writing. Some easter eggs for TJR fans!

(4 stars... Having lived in the 80's I noticed some details that were not authentic!)… (mer)

I may have enjoyed this book more if I had not just read several powerful international books that told stories of human suffering, pain and resilience. By contrast this story felt very insular, self-absorbed and inescapably American. This is the story of a fictional Hollywood star Evelyn Hugo, celebrated in the 1950s to 1970s for her beauty and sexuality. As she tells her life story and the tale of her multiple marriages to journalist Monique Grant, she unveils the extent of her willingness to do anything, compromise herself in any way, and use everybody to achieve her aims; including sacrificing her culture, identity and her relationship with the one person she truly loved. In some ways this reflects the difficulties faced by women in the film industry but on the other hand it just reveals the ugliness of the celebrity culture we live in and the way movie-stars can think they move in a different dimension and are above the common rules of morality and ethics. There was one very predictable reveal at the end of the book and one more surprising one. I know many people enjoyed this but it wasn’t really my cup of tea, and I think I allowed myself to be seduced into reading it based on a pretty cover and it matching a challenge prompt about Hollywood.… (mer)