Star Spangled Heavens

(from flyleaf) It was a far cry from organising the jumble sale in the sleepy little Essex village of Verwood to singing in the chorus of a Hollywood musical, but Sally Seton, young and beautiful, we only too eager to make the change. This was her opportunity to make a career for herself. True love, of course, was the very last thing she expected to find in the crazy, exciting, restless world of Hollywood.

There's a pretty thought that runs through this one -- the main characters all articulate some version of it -- which is that each individual person lives in their own world, and the big question in life is how to reach out from the world you experience to make authentic connections with others who are experiencing the same things differently: how, in other words, to bridge subjectivities. That, and the Yeats poem "quoted by kind permission of Mrs. W. B. Yeats" are the strongest parts of the book. The first-person female main character is pretty darn charming, but she's also very young and naive to the point of silliness (you start to see this a lot in mid-century category romances): the hero is completely opaque to her -- she has a very difficult time reading his intentions/motivations and she ends up accomodating his moods and his interests more than feels comfortable to the modern reader. But the Hollywood studio setting is fun and I appreciated the heroine's discomfort with private beaches. Thank you, California Coast Act of 1976! Also, a kind of wonderful dust jacket.