Astrid Hawk
As Long as You're Mine was the quintessential middle-of-the-bell-curve book in my opinion. It wasn't great. It wasn't terrible. You don't feel immersed in the time and place (1930s/1950s LA), but you don't feel completely adrift either. Most of the characters aren't hateful, but it's hard to really root for any of them either. There is a murder mystery but no stakes. No sense of accelerating urgency. It's just... a solidly OK, underwhelming book.
The book is told from the split perspective of Loralei Davies/Millicent Dawes, a light-skinned Black actress in the mid-1930s, and Thea Ross, a 20-year-old ballerina in the mid-1950s whose life and growing career are tightly controlled by her rich, competitive mother. For the first third of the book or so the perspective switches equally back and forth - 2 chapters of 1st person present tense for Loralei, and then 2 chapters of 3rd person past tense for Thea. The middle portion of the book starts seeing more and more devotion to Thea's perspective. And then in the final quarter or so we revisit Loralei again. If perspective-switching bothers you, or the 1st-person-present-tense style bothers you, you definitely won't want to read this one.
Loralei's story centers around finding her own way and figuring out who she is while surviving sexual abuse in Hollywood. Despite the fact that she's clearly a victim of her situation, the men controlling her and the women establishing a ruthless social pecking order to survive and get ahead at Loralei's expense, I found it really hard to sympathize with her. She has sex with multiple partners in the book. One of them is not consensual by today's standards. The other I assume was the man's idea given the time period, but she's totally into it. What doesn't make sense to me is that she says repeatedly throughout the book that she's in love with this guy, and then towards the end, when he suggests that they get married, she says she definitely was not in love with him, weren't they just having fun, weren't they just in lust with each other? I just found it impossible to feel bad for her.
Thea's story has a lot of thematic parallels, just without the sex. At 20 years old, having grown up in an extremely curated environment where everything about her childhood was designed to keep her insulated from the world and grow her career as a ballerina, she doesn't yet know who she is. She is drawn in to learning more about Loralei and uncovering the mystery around her death, and in doing so starts having a lot of parallel realizations about how she's similarly been trapped, following someone else's program. It would have been a cool parallel theme to tie the two story lines together, a good generational pattern playing out, but the author hits us over the head with it by literally spelling it out, not once but twice.
I think we're supposed to root for Thea, who asked for her situation even less than Loralei did, but it was still hard for me to get into it. Despite dealing with grief and having her sense of family get upended and being confronted with big coming-of-age questions (like her sexuality, what she wants to do in life, what kind of a person she is... big stuff) simultaneously, she just seems kind of... flat. She talks about being tired a lot, but that's about it.
As for the glamour of the Golden Age of Hollywood - no. There are a couple parties mentioned, but we mostly see the characters escaping the parties, not actually attending them. The blurb does the book a disservice in describing it as immersing in the glitz and glamour, because it's actually more about the rot underneath it. The sexism and misogyny that it ran (runs) on. Like a west coast Gatsby, but with none of the literary quality.
The mystery part of the story is fairly obvious from the beginning. I think that was intentional - the scene at the end with the "reveal" isn't presented very dramatically. I think the reader is supposed to get to the conclusion before Thea does and then watch her put the details together. Nothing wrong with that, but it's just less exciting to me than if the mystery really was unknown and unknowable. There are some loose ends in there too - Ramona is the prime example, but there are others with some minor characters.
Overall, the book was... fine. It wasn't boring, and it was a quick read, but I expect it will be forgettable. CW for rape, infidelity, pregnancy, labor/birth, and abortion.
As Long as You're Mine was the quintessential middle-of-the-bell-curve book in my opinion. It wasn't great. It wasn't terrible. You don't feel immersed in the time and place (1930s/1950s LA), but you don't feel completely adrift either. Most of the characters aren't hateful, but it's hard to really root for any of them either. There is a murder mystery but no stakes. No sense of accelerating urgency. It's just... a solidly OK, underwhelming book.
The book is told from the split perspective of Loralei Davies/Millicent Dawes, a light-skinned Black actress in the mid-1930s, and Thea Ross, a 20-year-old ballerina in the mid-1950s whose life and growing career are tightly controlled by her rich, competitive mother. For the first third of the book or so the perspective switches equally back and forth - 2 chapters of 1st person present tense for Loralei, and then 2 chapters of 3rd person past tense for Thea. The middle portion of the book starts seeing more and more devotion to Thea's perspective. And then in the final quarter or so we revisit Loralei again. If perspective-switching bothers you, or the 1st-person-present-tense style bothers you, you definitely won't want to read this one.
Loralei's story centers around finding her own way and figuring out who she is while surviving sexual abuse in Hollywood. Despite the fact that she's clearly a victim of her situation, the men controlling her and the women establishing a ruthless social pecking order to survive and get ahead at Loralei's expense, I found it really hard to sympathize with her. She has sex with multiple partners in the book. One of them is not consensual by today's standards. The other I assume was the man's idea given the time period, but she's totally into it. What doesn't make sense to me is that she says repeatedly throughout the book that she's in love with this guy, and then towards the end, when he suggests that they get married, she says she definitely was not in love with him, weren't they just having fun, weren't they just in lust with each other? I just found it impossible to feel bad for her.
Thea's story has a lot of thematic parallels, just without the sex. At 20 years old, having grown up in an extremely curated environment where everything about her childhood was designed to keep her insulated from the world and grow her career as a ballerina, she doesn't yet know who she is. She is drawn in to learning more about Loralei and uncovering the mystery around her death, and in doing so starts having a lot of parallel realizations about how she's similarly been trapped, following someone else's program. It would have been a cool parallel theme to tie the two story lines together, a good generational pattern playing out, but the author hits us over the head with it by literally spelling it out, not once but twice.
I think we're supposed to root for Thea, who asked for her situation even less than Loralei did, but it was still hard for me to get into it. Despite dealing with grief and having her sense of family get upended and being confronted with big coming-of-age questions (like her sexuality, what she wants to do in life, what kind of a person she is... big stuff) simultaneously, she just seems kind of... flat. She talks about being tired a lot, but that's about it.
As for the glamour of the Golden Age of Hollywood - no. There are a couple parties mentioned, but we mostly see the characters escaping the parties, not actually attending them. The blurb does the book a disservice in describing it as immersing in the glitz and glamour, because it's actually more about the rot underneath it. The sexism and misogyny that it ran (runs) on. Like a west coast Gatsby, but with none of the literary quality.
The mystery part of the story is fairly obvious from the beginning. I think that was intentional - the scene at the end with the "reveal" isn't presented very dramatically. I think the reader is supposed to get to the conclusion before Thea does and then watch her put the details together. Nothing wrong with that, but it's just less exciting to me than if the mystery really was unknown and unknowable. There are some loose ends in there too - Ramona is the prime example, but there are others with some minor characters.
Overall, the book was... fine. It wasn't boring, and it was a quick read, but I expect it will be forgettable. CW for rape, infidelity, pregnancy, labor/birth, and abortion.
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