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LAST NIGHT AT THE BLUE ANGEL By: Rebecca Rotert
HarperTeen
July 2014
On Sale: July 1, 2014
Featuring: Naomi Hill; Sophia; Jim
336 pages ISBN: 0062315285 EAN: 9780062315281 Kindle: B00FOPS58A Hardcover / e-Book
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Young Adult
Set against the turbulence of 1960s Chicagoβa city in transformationβand its legendary jazz scene, Last Night at the Blue Angel is a lush and immensely heartfelt mother-daughter tale about a talented but troubled singerβs relationship with her precocious ten-year-old daughter. It is the early 1960s, and Chicago is teeming with the tensions of the dayβsegregation, sexual experimentation, the Cold War and Vietnamβbut it is also home to some of the countryβs most influential jazz. Naomi Hill, a singer at the Blue Angel club, has been poised on the brink of stardom for nearly ten years. But when her big break, the cover of Look magazine, finally arrives, it carries with it an enormous personal cost. Sensual and magnetic, Naomi is a fiercely ambitious yet self-destructive woman whose charms tend to hurt those around her, and no one knows this better than her daughter, Sophia. As the only child of a single mother growing up in an adult world, Sophia is wise beyond her years, a casualty of her motherβs desperate struggle for fame and adoration. Unsettled by her home life, she harbors a terrible fear that her world could disappear at any moment, and compulsively maintains a list of everyday objects she might need to reinvent should nuclear catastrophe strike. Her only constant is the colorful and unconventional family that surrounds her and her mother, particularly the photographer, Jim, who is Sophiaβs best friend, surrogate father, and protectorβbut Jim is also deeply in love with Naomi.
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