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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Beautifully imagined and plotted, deftly blending tinselly melodrama with astute commentary on politics, sex, and issues of personal ethics and responsibility.
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Outstanding
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Library Journal Starr E. Smith
This is a big, busthng, old-fashioned novel inhabited by outsize characters facing moral dilemmas amid the extravagant environment of Hollywood in the 1950s. [1 Sept 2004, p.139]
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
Frank adopts some of the stylistic conventions of mainstream 1950s fiction to mixed effect, but she does a stupendous job of allowing the reader inside each character's self-justifying world view.
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Favorable
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The Economist
Her account of the inescapable legacy of the blacklist, the wrecked lives, lost opportunities and the bitterness between friends who became betrayers and betrayed makes for a spectacularly good read.
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Favorable
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Entertainment Weekly Jennifer Reese
Imagine Cheat and Charmer as a juicy mid-'80s television movie starring Morgan Fairchild and Linda Evans.
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Mixed
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USA Today Donna Freydkin
By and large, Frank delivers the goods even if her novel plods along at times and gets bogged down by details about parties, beach flings and dinners that distract from the meat of her tale.
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Mixed
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LA Weekly Michelle Huneven
Whether you see it as literature or guilty (if slightly tedious) pleasure, Cheat and Charmer will make a delicious movie — and be a casting director’s field day.
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Mixed
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Booklist Mary Ellen Quinn
Frank took 25 years to write this book, and it shows--the story is rich but also overstuffed. [1 Sept 2004, p.5]
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Unfavorable
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Chicago Tribune Art Winslow
It's when considered as literature that Cheat and Charmer comes up shy: It doesn't have the imaginative compass that it should, given the subject matter, and the level of artistic surprise, sentence by sentence or scene by scene, is rather low. [7 Nov 2004]
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Unfavorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Heller McAlpin
Willfully old-fashioned and determinedly apolitical, and as a result seems not just historical but dated.
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Unfavorable
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PopMatters Anne K. Yoder
Delivers many compelling scenes of a woman's struggle to balance her own needs with those of her family, but dually flounders in its disregard for pithiness.
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Terrible
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Washington Post Martha Sherrill
In this, her first novel, an ambitious epic that was 25 years in the making, both external and internal worlds seem over-explained and over-described. Sometimes when we're inside Dinah's head, the flow of subconscious blather is just maddening.
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Terrible
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
These people not only talk the talk, but also walk the walk of bad cinema stick figures. They are one-dimensional to the point of parody, and behave predictably like case studies in Freud 101.
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Terrible
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The New York Times Book Review Richard Eder
Frank's epic Hollywood frieze turns out to be just wallpaper: the patterns repeat over and over. By the last page, you feel like you're departing an empty room rather than finishing a long story.
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