Sophia loves watching her emotional, but somehow distant mother, Naomi, sing at the Blue Angel. For years, Naomi has dreamed of fame and a chance to make something of herself in spite of all life's hardships. Together, they must deal with their relationship as it grows in both strength and despair while they battle the stress of a not-so-glamourous life.
Full of touching prose, heartbreaking moments, and the exact feel of a slow and soulful song, LAST NIGHT AT THE BLUE ANGEL by Rebeca Rotert will have you up at all hours of the night thinking about two characters who can't fail to touch your heart. The alternating perspectives between Naomi and Sophia show how different and important perspective is as well as how complicated the relationship between mother and daughter can be. The crucial themes of learning how to love without barriers while navigating both the simplicity and complexity of everyday life and how to distinguish truth and trust in a world of agendas, vanity, and greed are absolutely mesmerizing and would be excellent for a group discussion.
What I love the most is the contrast between Sophia and her mom. On one hand, we have the story of a young woman who never quite fit in but whose love could embody a hundred songs. On the other, we have the story of a young girl just learning about the darkness of life while harboring the oldest sort of soul on the inside. Their relationship is far from perfect. It holds an emotional kind of distance, a fragile balance, and even a little neglect, but it also holds a powerful love worth fighting for.
Though the story leads up to the final night at the Blue Angel, don't be surprised if you find your mind returning there over and over after you finish the story. Rebecca Rotert has written a stunning novel of desperate beauty in LAST NIGHT AT THE BLUE ANGEL that will fit perfectly on shelves with Emma Donoghue and Jodi Picoult.
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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