Martha Sherrill is the author of The Buddha from Brooklyn, a work of nonfiction, and My Last Movie Star, a novel.
With this eccentric coming-of-age story, Sherrill (My Last Movie Star) offers an interesting, if emotionally distant, window into California culture of the 1970s as well as an almost clinical examination of one extended family. Inez Ruin is a girl caught between suburban Los Angeles, where she lives with her mother, Connie (a former dancer), and her working class grandmother Abuelita, and San Francisco, where her sports car-driving, guitar-playing computer scientist father, Paul, parades a series of beautiful girlfriends. This unconventional family also includes a rich paternal grandmother (an artist's model in her glory days) and an adored hippie surfer half-brother, Whitman. Though Inez's evolution from passive observer to active participant in her colorful world is the story's driving force, the novel lacks a substantive structure. Sherrill describes Inez's world with reportorial precision, but the accumulation of detail doesn't always contribute to the narrative's momentum, giving the story a memoirish rather than a novelistic feel. By the end, however, the relationship between Inez and her father blossoms into the emotional center of this offbeat tale. Agent, Flip Brophy. (Jan.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Poor Inez; she's caught between the security afforded by her mom and immigrant grandmother and the sophistication promised by her glamorous but irresponsible dad. With a West Coast tour. Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
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