The description on the book jacket sounds exciting; a
teenage girl lacks confidence in the early 1980’s, feels out of place at her
posh New England private boarding school, and asks her idol Lillian Hellman for a job as
a domestic. Hellman is nasty from the get go, and turns out to an old witch. But
that’s where my attention span ended. This book is repetitive, drags on and on,
so by page 50 I had to give up. I never got to read about all the nasty stuff
in this book, because I couldn’t get past the author’s terrible writing. She
spends too many pages on picking up and putting away.
I’m not even sure if there can be any surprises. Lillian
Hellman is renowned, but nowhere near as much as others. I never read any of
her works in high school or college, and anyone under 35 years old will probably
be more familiar with Harper Lee than Hellman. Finding out that Hellman was a
mean old hag was not a surprise. It wouldn’t be hard for me to believe it.
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