Outraged by her grandfather's illicit affair with Empire
Pictures’ latest femme fatale, Roxanne Granville forsakes her position as
Hollywood royalty and rejects the man who raised her, determined to strike out
on her own. Backed by little more than the stubborn grit she inherited from her
beloved grandmother, Roxanne sets up shop as a low-budget film agent for
budding screenwriters.
When an old friend, exiled from Hollywood and Empire
Pictures by her grandfather for being a Communist sympathizer, begs for her
help, Roxanne decides to right the wrongs committed by her family by selling
his script under someone else’s name. After all, it’s what her grandmother
would have wanted.
Soon Roxanne finds herself at the helm of a lucrative business,
having landed her secret clients a handful of major studio deals through
willing front men. Her newfound freedom leads her to a passionate relationship
with Terrence Dexter, an African American journalist and jazz aficionado. But
Hollywood is ruthless when it senses a scandal. How long will it take before
all of Roxanne's success comes crumbling down?
My Thoughts…
Picture a time when Reds (communists) are being blackballed,
colored and whites are not allowed to date, and television is just starting to
come into its own. That is the timing
of The Great Pretenders. Roxanne is
the granddaughter of the head of a movie studio, the daughter of a big-time actor
and has lived a privileged life without much thought to how she got there.
I love, love, love how strong Roxanne is. She stands up to her grandfather, she
starts making waves in the movie world with her scripts and then has a
relationship that will never be accepted in California. As she stands up for those that Hollywood
has pushed aside, she proves that she has a strength that will get her where
she wants to go and that she has the connections to make things happen. She knows that she has to trust people to
help her along, keep her secrets, and make things happen but mostly it is all
on her own strength and will power.
The names mentioned throughout this book, the movies
mentioned, the television shows named are all iconic names. They bring to life the timing of the book,
the way life was at the time, and how the world worked in a time that maybe
isn’t quite so different from the time we live in now. While it was decades ago, there are plenty
of similarities that I saw while reading this book and it opened my eyes to
some of the world we live in.
Add to your MUST-READ list on Goodreads
About the author
Laura Kalpakian has won a National
Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, the Pacific Northwest
Booksellers’ Award (twice), the Anahid Award for an American writer of Armenian
descent, the PEN West Award, and the Stand International Short Fiction
Competition. She has had residencies at the Virginia Center for the Creative
Arts, the Montalvo Center for the Arts, and Hawthornden Castle in Scotland. She
is the author of multiple novels and over a hundred stories published in
collections, anthologies, literary journals and magazines in the U.S. and the
U.K. A native of California, Laura lives in the Pacific Northwest.
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