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Zoland Books
April 2009
On Sale: April 7, 2009
Featuring: Ramona Smollens
224 pages
ISBN: 1586421573
EAN: 9781586421571
Paperback
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Women's Fiction
Coming of age in 1940s and 1950s America, Ramona Smollens
takes her cues about female sexuality from Hollywood movie
stars. None is more voluptuous than Rita Hayworth, the
redhead who knows how to please a man and becomes a
volcano of passion at her lover's touch, whose image
inspired American flyers on their missions in World War II
and even graced the first atomic bomb tested at the Bikini
atoll. Ramona marries young and escapes her mother's house
shortly after the death of her father. She takes with her
a dark family secret, the sort of secret one simply did
not talk about and that would stalk her as she matured
into her role as wife and mother, remained a devoted
daughter to her aging mother, and secretly harbored an
obsession with the iconic Hayworth. The fictional story
Wagman tells of one woman's struggle with the conventions
of her day is a bold literary achievement. Underpinning it
all is the sad, unspoken truth of the real-life, flesh-and-
blood Hayworth, the woman whose father sexually abused
her. "Men go to bed with Gilda," She used to say, "but
wake up with me." During Hayworth's lifetime, the public
had no understanding of the depth of mean, and pain,
behind Hayworth's seemingly self-effacing words. To
Ramona, and millions of women like her, Hayworth's on-
screen persona seemed the ideal, but was in fact "the
lie." With this novel, Wagman realizes Kafkas famous
dictum that "a book must be the axe that breaks the frozen
sea within us."
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