Review by Booklist Review
Historical and contemporary fiction collide satisfyingly in Schine's (The Grammarians, 2019) latest novel. The Austrian Jewish Künstler family's established, prosperous life is threatened when creeping Nazi reforms erode their freedom. Fortunately, they escape Vienna in 1939 and settle in Los Angeles, finding themselves on the fringes of its European émigré community. Salomea ("Mamie"), 11, enthusiastically explores her new home, helping her parents and aging grandfather learn English. When Mamie is 93, she invites her 23-year-old grandson, Julian, to stay with her; his New York life has disintegrated since he lost both his girlfriend and his roommate. His parents refuse to subsidize his aimless existence, so he reluctantly accepts Mamie's offer, only to linger when the pandemic strikes. Over the months, Mamie recounts fascinating anecdotes about meeting famous writers and luminaries such as Greta Garbo. Contrasting the wartime excesses in Hollywood with privation in Austria, Mamie and Julian liken COVID-era isolation to the sense of exile so many faced when they fled Europe. Schine's admirers will be enthralled, as will fans of Nancy Thayer and Elin Hilderbrand.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Schine (The Grammarians) delivers another witty novel of manners, this time juxtaposing 1940s Hollywood with the present. Mamie Kunstler, 11, escapes from Vienna with her well-to-do Jewish family just as WWII begins. They settle in Los Angeles, where Mamie's playwright mother, Ilse, lands a job writing for the movies. In 2020, as L.A. goes into pandemic lockdown, cantankerous Mamie takes her 24-year-old grandson, Julian, into her crumbling Venice home. Mamie entertains Julian, who's having trouble finding himself, with stories about her charmed life around the movies, when, at a young age, she knew Christopher Isherwood, Anita Loos, and Greta Garbo, the last of whom she encountered on the beach at 12 and reconnected with at 20, the details of which she teases out to an increasingly enraptured Julian. One day while walking Mamie's Saint Bernard, Julian meets Sophie, an attractive neighbor, and the two strike up a friendship with the promise of romance. Nothing much happens over the course of this effervescent confection, but it hardly matters because Mamie, Julian, and company are such enjoyable characters to hang out with. Reading like a cross between Leopoldstadt and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, this does the trick as an emotionally resonant meditation on family, memory, and the need for stories. (Mar.)
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Review by Library Journal Review
While job hunting, slightly lost New Yorker Julian Künstler is trapped in Los Angeles by COVID and ends up bunking with feisty 93-year-old grandmother Mamie, whose family arrived in California in 1939 from Vienna. And has she got stories to tell about the community that surrounded them--from the Jewish artists and intellectuals who fled Hitler to the likes of Christopher Isherwood and Greta Garbo. From the author of theNew York Times best-selling The Three Weissmanns of Westport; with a 125,000-copy first printing.
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
The plight of Jewish intellectuals evicted from their homes by Hitler meets the plight of Los Angeles families trapped in their homes by the pandemic. " 'I do not believe in life after death,' Mamie said. 'I sometimes have trouble believing in life before death: it is all so improbable.' " With her usual bounty of witticisms and aperçus, Schine takes on the recent plague year from the perspectives of two protagonists. Mamie Künstler is a 93-year-old violinist who came to Los Angeles from Vienna in 1939 with her parents, Austrian Jews who became fixtures in the Hollywood émigré community. Eighty-some years later, Mamie lives in a bungalow in Venice with her long-time companion, Agatha, "a person of indeterminate age and indeterminate nationality whose job description was both indeterminate and, as far as Julian could tell, all-encompassing." Julian is Mamie's grandson, age 24. When we meet him, he is lolling around New York pursuing esoteric hobbies, such as transcribing the screenplays of Kurosawa. Desperate to jump-start his life, Julian's parents send him to the West Coast to help Mamie, who has recently fractured her wrist, and Agatha, whose driver's license has been suspended. Not long after Julian arrives, he's trapped by lockdown. "I'm terrified, pissed off, and bored," he tells his grandmother. "That is a perfect description of my childhood, Julian. Uncanny." As the relationship between the two develops, as the rhythms of quarantine take over, including the ubiquitous "jingling tray" of the cocktail hour(s), Mamie begins to share the stories of her youth, which feature well-known real people such as Otto Preminger, Arnold Schoenberg, and, most importantly, Greta Garbo. Meanwhile, Julian is awarded a pandemic romance, allowing Schine to revisit the unpleasant social rituals of 2020 and '21 with characteristic wryness: "With the languorous timing of a stripper, Sophie detached one elastic from one ear, the other elastic from the other ear. She batted her eyelashes at him, then slowly, slowly lowered the mask as if it were a veil, an exotic veil." Dreamy, drifty, and droll, studded with lush botanical description and historical gems. Schine's many fans will enjoy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
