House Lights: A Novel
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3.0 • 5 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
A New York Times Book Review Notable Book
A Boston Globe Bestseller
"Simply—gorgeous." —Los Angeles Times
Late in her twentieth year, Beatrice mails a letter on the sly, sparking events that will change her life forever. The addressee is her grandmother, a legendary stage actress long estranged from her daughter, Bea’s mother. Though Bea wants to become an actress herself, it is the desire to understand the old family rift that drives her to work her way into her grandmother’s graces.
But just as she establishes a precarious foothold in her grandmother’s world, Bea’s elite Boston home life begins to crumble. Her beloved father is accused of harassment by one of his graduate students; her usually serene, self-certain mother shows signs of fallibility. And Bea is falling in love with someone many would consider inappropriate.
Powerfully written and psychologically intricate, House Lights illuminates the corrosive power of family secrets, and the redemptive struggle to find truth, forgiveness, and love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In the overly precious third novel from Train Go Sorry author Hager Cohen, Beatrice "Bebe" Fisher-Hart is the almost 20-year-old only child of two coolly articulate Boston therapists. Bebe's parents duly swallow their mortification and allow her to remain at home, all expenses paid, when she decides to defer college to have a serious go at acting, like her estranged maternal grandmother, Margaret Fourcey. A retired theater actress with a legendary reputation, Margaret lives just across the Charles River, but Bebe hardly sees her and knows little about her life or her estrangement from the family. When Bebe finds out her revered father may have been professionally inappropriate, she lashes out in disillusion and anger, and takes refuge with Margaret. Her paternalistic relationship with theater director Hale Rubin, a 50-ish member of her grandmother's "salon," deepens. Hale is an idealized character, tailor-made to fill the gap left by Bebe's father's fall from grace, and Bebe, while more-or-less sanguinely tempered, is just this side of annoyingly narcissistic. Bebe's struggles are believable, but the hothouse atmosphere makes the stakes feel small, and Bebe herself something less than likable.
