Review by Booklist Review
Hazel Francis did her fair share for the war effort. Working as one of the "Rosie the Riveters" from the factory floor to helping build airplanes, she felt good working with her hands and feeling like she was contributing. When the war was over and the men were back, she found herself without a job. While society expected her to become a wife and start a family, Hazel wanted to work with airplanes, but no one was hiring. With no more than a suitcase, she heads to Laguna Beach, California, to answer a job ad for an assistant to a famous local artist, Hanson Radcliff. Little does she know that Radcliff has a scandal from his past regarding his art, and she must help him protect it. Before she realizes it, she becomes part of the artist community in Laguna Beach. She helps to plan and take part in the artists' pageant depicting live posed masterpieces. She makes friends and becomes especially friendly with Jimmy, the local hotel's bartender. Never having meant to build a life in Laguna Beach, Hazel questions her future and dream of working again with airplanes. A quick historical read about work relationships, friendship, and adaptability.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Harrison (Montauk) chronicles a woman's effort to reinvent herself after WWII in her appealing latest. Hazel Francis leaves Wichita, Kans., at 19 in 1942 for a manufacturing job with Douglas Aircraft in El Segundo, Calif. After the war ends, Hazel loses her job and eventually ends up at Laguna Beach, where she finds a spot assisting artist Hanson Radcliff. As Hazel adjusts to the mercurial Hanson and insinuates herself in the beachside community, she volunteers for the annual artists' Pageant of the Masters, a show where live models pose as the subjects of paintings. Hazel befriends a bartender named Jimmy, though her hopes for romance are quashed after she discovers his longtime girlfriend is joining him at Laguna Beach. Meanwhile, Hazel helps the prickly Hanson recover a missing painting of his onetime lover, actor Isabella Rose, who died by suicide after he ended their relationship. Though the episodic threads don't develop into a traditional plot, they succeed in coloring in various aspects of Hazel's life. The author pulls no punches in her account of the difficulties Hazel faces as a woman in postwar America, and the descriptions of the historical pageant are convincing. Harrison's story of self-determination is one to savor. (June)
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Review by Library Journal Review
Let go from her job as a riveter at Douglas Aircraft when World War II ends and young men eager for jobs return home, Hazel Francis has no job, no housing, and no family nearby her in California. Returning to her Kansas hometown is impossible due to an unfortunate relationship, and she misses the skill, sense of meaning, and importance of her former job. After a failed interview for a Los Angeles job, she impulsively stops in fabled Laguna Beach and instantly falls in love with the beauty of the oceanside artistic community. She soon lands a job there and an apartment as assistant to Laguna Beach's most successful artist, Hanson Radcliff. Hanson, benevolent and cantankerous by turns, has dark secrets that repel and fascinate her. After several near disasters, Hazel becomes part of a community, as she has always longed to do, and manages to repay her employer's generosity by saving his reputation. VERDICT Harrison's third historical (after The Show Girl) is a fascinating story that would benefit from further explorations of her characters' motives. In the end, it is Laguna Beach itself that becomes the protagonist, thus the novel will appeal mostly to people who love this region and reading about the immediate postwar era.--Cynthia Johnson
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