Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?
The Hollywood blacklist and the Red Scare hunt for Communists shattered careers and left scars that last. Liza Jane still has a few and they emerge when her heirs try to untangle a will that requires burial in her own oak grove.
Amanda Cockrell has written a zinger of a novel with serious import—here's the real human tragedy of the Hollywood blacklist with verve and style. Cockrell's unerring sense of time and place allows her to present California without cliché, then and now, as she shifts between past and present time. A mesmerizing read.
—Lee Smith, author of Fair and Tender Ladies, On Agate Hill, Saving Grace