Starring Adele Astaire
This charming, witty, and absorbing novel centers on the talented dancer/actress Adele Astaire, who wowed audiences performing with her later more famous brother Fred during the 1920s and 1930s in America and England. The author intertwines Adele’s story with that of a young, working-class English girl, Violet Wood, who has ambitious dreams of becoming an actress. Delly, lovely, classy, enthusiastic, and wildly talented, was a vaudeville and Broadway star before being enticed to the London stage in 1923. While rehearsing in London’s West End, she meets and gives the eager waitress Violet a break in her current show, Stop Flirting, and the two begin a friendship that lasts over decades, through scandals, secrets, hardships, and heartaches.
Knight sets her cast firmly in the era of Prohibition, a time of speakeasies, luxury ocean liners, and jazz, with a smooth narrative that fairly bursts with theatre and film references, news events, popular books and trends, methods of travel, and prominent personalities of the day. Her portrayals of both young women are sympathetic and realistic: the successful Delly, who longs to leave the business and to be settled with a husband and family and discovers much disappointment and heartache as well as joy; and the poor but talented young Violet, who yearns to be a smashing success and help her financially strapped family, but is forced to navigate the dark side of show business to reach her goals. Their lives are similar but different, and Knight, with her extensive research and smart storytelling, creatively presents both in ways that engage and hold the reader’s interest throughout. I was completely hooked by their stories, and enjoyed their turns in the spotlight.
