Brilliant Divorces

From Publishers Weekly Singer's tawdry tale about a poor girl's rise to wealth through a series of doomed marriages makes for tiresome reading. In Beverly Hills, Nora Grant's perpetually angry stepdaughter Sam hosts a party for her best friend Honey Rose in anticipation of Honey's enormous divorce settlement. All of the party-goers are ex-wives with bitter stories, and Singer casually mingles their tales with a smattering of real-life Hollywood divorces like those of Norman Lear and Steven Spielberg. But it is Nora's matrimonial track record that makes up the bulk of the book. After a post-WW II marriage of convenience to a gay aristocrat, she weds an actor and a former American ambassador in quick succession before finally settling down with powerful studio magnate T. S. Grant (and Sam). The blatant admiration for rich ex-wives and the sordid, greedy atmosphere tarnishes Singer's ( The Debutantes ) efforts to construct a credible true love for Nora. While she documents incest, sleazy affairs, family greed, wife-beating and all manner of sexual couplings in competent prose, she fails to interest the reader in her heroine. The journey through Nora's life is very dull. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Beautiful, affectionate Nora Hall rises from the pubs of World War II London to a position of power in Hollywood in this fluffy but readable novel. Nora, who is married and widowed or divorced several times, is always searching futilely for the kind of true love she herself has to offer. Much of the story is devoted to her attempts to help Sam, her confused and alienated stepdaughter, and Sam's friends, Honey and Babe. The narrative jumps between past and present, glossing over so much of Nora's personal history that many of the characters are not fully realized. However, the veteran author of scads of successful commercial fiction, including The President's Women ( LJ 10/15/88), keeps the plot moving and readers' interest engaged. For light fiction collections.