Stars over Clear Lake
In 2007, widowed Lorraine Kindred walks into the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa; it’s the first time she’s been there since 1947, on the night of a terrible fire. She’s immediately transported back to her teenage years, when everyone went to the Surf, to listen to the music of bands like Jimmy Dorsey’s, to dance, and to flirt.
Lorraine had gone with her brother, Pete, and hoped to go with dreamy Scotty Bishop, on a real date. There was even a chance she could sing at venues like this. But in 1944 Pete enlisted, and Lorraine’s mother took to her bed; Lorraine assisted her father on the farm, which included feeding five men shipped in from a nearby POW camp who helped with the harvest. Nazis, right in her yard! A wary Lorraine agrees to teach English to one of the prisoners, Jens, and she discovers that not all Germans are monsters—some of them like music and singing, just like she does. Decades later, she still struggles, as her emotionally distant and technologically distracted daughter doesn’t want to hear Lorraine’s stories.
The dissonance between Lorraine’s evolving viewpoint and the attitude of her mother and the rest of the town—and now her daughter—is the novel’s focal point and strength. Chapters switch between the present day and the war years, and Ellsworth deftly moves between Lorraine as a confused and torn young woman and as a senior citizen trying to reconcile the present and the past. Other characters, however, are drawn broadly with little development; each has only one note to sound in the story. Inspired by a real ballroom, Ellsworth’s story puts readers in the front row as big bands play and dancing couples swirl by, bringing the past to life, and making a family story come full circle.
