All the Stars in the Heavens

Adriana Trigiani's All the Stars in the Heavens is the fictitious account of Loretta Young's career and - in particular - romance with Clark Gable, which led to the highly hushed up birth of a daughter, Judy. The first half of the book especially is engaging and page-turning; the late chapters feel slightly more forced, but the book in its entirety certainly evokes Old Hollywood in all of its glory.

If the above paragraph feels slightly ambivalent to you - it is. I actually finished this book well over one week ago, and I've been really struggling with my feelings about it in the interim. The book is very well written. Certainly much of it is well-researched - enough so that I wanted to learn a bit more about Loretta Young. But, and this is an awfully big but, as I was reading more about Young, I learned that in her later years she spoke openly about her relationship with Gable - and characterized their supposed "romance" as date rape. Surely Trigiani came across these same claims in her research, yet it appears she chose to wholly and entirely disregard them in favor of creating a narrative about a failed romance and inventing circumstances that kept Gable and Young perpetually apart, Young pining for Gable until her last days.

This feels wrong to me on so many levels, not least the fact that it diminishes Young's experience, that I'm unable to take an unbiased view toward the work itself. Thus, rather than recommend All the Stars in the Heavens for its sweeping portrayal of glittering Old Hollywood, I would prefer to recommend two other titles in which the golden days of the movie industry are equally well-imagined: The Chaperone and West of Sunset, if you're interested in further reading of the same genre.