June 2, 2014
Driven to the brink of suicide by the thoughtlessly abusive adults around her, young Mary Mabel McTavish gains unsought fame when she brings Timmy Beeford back from the dead. A woman who can work miracles is of incomparable value to the con artists, newspaper magnates and well-intended extremists of the Depression era. guided by her late mother's voice, Mary Mabel is caught in a storm of attention as adults from skeptical reporter K.O Doyle to the intermittently lucid Brother Percy Brubacher contend to define and exploit her, scarcely considering what her views in the matter might be. Stratton's (Chanda's Secrets) comedic examination of celebrity in a bygone era, the novel acknowledges that media frenzies are in no way a uniquely modern phenomenon, nor is the way the people at the center of these frenzies are often helpless to prevent their public images from being molded to suit the great and powerful, the ambitious and the brazen opportunists. As the plot weaves back and forth across Canada and America, celebrities from Hoover to Hearst are skewered, but at no point does the book lose sight of its essential good nature or that of its protagonist.
April 15, 2014
Lightly inspired by the real-life story of Aimee Semple McPherson, the Canadian girl who became an evangelist and media darling in the 1920s, this fine novel set in the '30s takes young Mary Mabel McTavish from her Ontario home to Los Angeles, where she becomes a media sensation and hobnobs with some of Hollywood's elite. Like some of the great comic novelsCatch-22, for example, or M*A*S*Hthis one gets its humor from its characters: young Mary; conniving Hearst reporter K. O. Doyle; preacher Percy Brubacher and his manipulative partner, Floyd Cruickshank; even eccentric ol' W. R. Hearst himself. There are plenty of funny situations here, but the situations are driven by the characters rather than an author thinking up humorous set-pieces and contriving to get the characters into them. This is a stylishly written, very funny historical novel that has some smart things to say about the mass media, manufactured phenomena, and religious nogoodniks.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)