When a woman is born, she is given a choice of two paths: beauty without intelligence, or intelligence without beauty. An intelligent beauty who makes her mark on the world through movies and science - the technology that the world has recently discovered - is a paradoxical aberration to the world because she fits into neither category and dares to defy expectations and stereotypes that have long existed to deny potential to human beings. Enter Heddy Lamarr, a famous movie star from the late 1930s and 1940s, the main character in THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM by Marie Benedict.

From the start of this novel in the 1930s, an excited Heddy Kiesler is in a play about the early life of Empress Elisabeth of Austria, and its at this play she meets a man destined to change her life: Friedrich Mandl, an ammunitions expert who wants Heddy as his wife. Through a whirlwind courtship, as well as worrying news about Germany and Hitler's ambitions for Austria and the Jewish population, Heddy agrees to become his wife, but the cost of being safe and wealthy comes with a high cost when her husband turns out to be not who she imagined.

Skillfully weaving the plot from Austria to the U.S., Marie Benedict creates a complex and moving story of a woman who seems to be constantly between two worlds and who often grapples with survivor's guilt after escaping turmoil and finding success. While I didn't know anything about Heddy Lamarr, I was really intrigued to discover her humanity, the different roles she played both in films and in real life, and her many adventures. I mourned the fact that the novel was too short; I wanted to be taken beyond WWII and to see more of her life and the long-lasting implications of some of the decision she had made.

THE ONLY WOMAN IN THE ROOM by Marie Benedict is great for historical fiction readers looking for a woman ahead of her time, both an unlikely scientist and an ambitious movie star: Hedy Lamarr.