Hotel Laguna
Hazel Francis is a heroine for any woman who has been told, “Well, no, you can’t do that.” She’s an intrepid soul whose headlong sense of adventure leads her to her first sexual encounter with a boyhood friend, who now assumes they will marry. He leaves for war, she writes him a Dear John letter, he is killed, and the sense of being responsible (another thing many women will empathize with) haunts her.
The war offers a chance to flee Kansas to do meaningful work in California. In Los Angeles, Hazel builds airplanes and regains a sense of self, until the war ends and all the women are shooed home to have babies and keep house, the jobs now belonging to the men who return. Rootless, jobless, and penniless, she lands in the artists’ colony of Laguna Beach, with work as assistant and model to a crusty artist with a long-ago death on his conscience.
With engaging characters and a romance to complicate things, Hotel Laguna is a spirited tale of a woman who insists on being her own person without putting overly 21st-century ideas in a mid-20th-century head. A missing painting and a Hollywood starlet fallen out of favor add mystery to the mix. The first-person prose is skillful and the dialog deft. A reader who enjoys a well-drawn sense of place will appreciate settings like the Laguna Beach art scene of the late Forties and the wartime aircraft plants where women built the planes men would fly, until being told they were no longer needed.
