Did You Hear about Kitty Karr?: A Novel

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Kitty had become an urban legend postmortem, a Sunset Boulevard caricature who, rumor said, had committed suicide after years of seclusion. Their parents, working through a battle in their marriage, took up residence in Paris by that December, granting Elise family separation and consequent career growth. But I’m pretty picky on how late I’ll read a book now because I need my energy to keep with an active toddler! In the 1950s, daughter Mary graduates high school, assumes a white persona, and starts working in Hollywood where she encounters many people with their own secrets.

It would've been easy to put this book down and never pick it back up had it not for those I was reading with. There’s a ton of characters in the Elise storyline right at the beginning and it was a little hard to keep track of. In Paul’s appealing if overlong debut, a Black Hollywood family reckons with a surprising and complicated past.Elise is the family’s latest star of the silver screen and up for an Academy Award for Best Actress. When the late White movie star, Kitty Karr Tate, leaves her multimillion dollar fortune and estate to the St. is an intoxicating and seductive debut, drawing you into an underground Hollywood world that is as glamorous as it is dangerous.

compound to attend a memorial service for former film star Kitty Karr Tate, their beloved elderly next-door neighbor.

What’s interesting is a character says to Elise in the present that he doesn’t believe that—there’s always a choice to be made. There was some drama between Elise and her fiancé, and a romantic plot with Elise and another man, and which distracted from what I was really interested in, which was Elise’s relationship with her sisters and her personal response to Kitty’s death. It captured the horrors of racism, the tight bonds that tie us generationally, the nightmare that colorism causes in the Black community. I really liked Kitty as a character and felt for the difficult decisions she had to make due to industry and societal standards.

James was a producer who played fourteen instruments, wrote and arranged music, and had a vocal range from Maxwell to Barry White. Historical fiction isn't my go-to but I found this novel about Black women passing in Hollywood riveting. John—three black sisters who have been famous since birth thanks to the accomplishments of their actress mother and musician father—the inheritance opens up a barrage of questions from the press and public. Sometimes the emotional restraint it took to conceal her unhappiness was just a hair away from masochism.It was interesting all that Kitty had to go through in her life and to find out how her life intertwined with the other women in this book. Although I found the premise utterly intriguing and the writing to be bingeable, I struggled with the overall execution of this book, which left it feeling like a very average read with a lot to say but an inability to actually do so.

The story as I mentioned could have been a great story but it suffered from a disorganized storytelling and a weak modern framing of that story. I can only hope that further revisions were made between the advanced copy I received and the final publication. Out of the 2 timelines, I found the past one a lot more interesting - the characters in the present timeline were not as engaging but it was still a great story overall. Kitty Karr is an iconoclastic, complicated, and fascinating woman, whose legacy is as relevant as ever today.The truth behind Kitty's ascent to stardom from her beginnings in the segregated South threatens to expose a web of unexpected family ties, debts owed, and debatable crimes that could, with one pull, unravel the all-American fabric of the St. It was a symbol of celebrity, a club into which everyone wanted entry—a partition between gods and mortals.