Reviews with content warning for Toxic relationship - La femme qui en savait trop

Famous actress Hedy Lamarr has a lot of secrets. She's from a Jewish family during one of the most anti-Semitic times in the 20th century. She arrived in America after fleeing her wealthy arms dealer husband. She has a brilliant mind that she hopes to use to help stop Nazi Germany to make up for warning no one about the imminent Anschluss.

I did enjoy reading this, which based on my rules means it's a 3 star at least. However, I don't think Marie Benedict's execution did everything the book blurb lead me to expect from this book by a long shot. I assumed this would be divided between Hedy's relationship with Austrian arms dealer Friedrich Mandl and her time in America as an actress/inventor. The first part was done well, as I watched with concern as the young Lamarr (then known as Hedy Keisler) fell in love with a much older man in spite of the red flags, in part because her parents encouraged her, hoping this would protect their family from the threat of anti-Semitism from Nazi Germany. The second half seemed more focused on her rise as an actress while she heard about how her home country of Austria fell and relegated the inventing work that Hedy did to very short montages...even though it seemed like the climax of the story was somewhere in the very brief interludes of her inventing work with the pianist George Antheil. Perhaps the worst failure is that you have to read the Author's Note to know how important frequency hopping is to modern technology, which seemed pretty important. Perhaps an epilogue about her and Antheil receiving acknowledgement for their invention would at least execute that part?

The characters are interesting, although I often wanted more time with many characters. Even Mandl, who I immensely disliked for his manipulative and abusive tendencies, seemed to vanish off the face of the earth after Hedy's escape, which (while perhaps what really happened) struck me as implausible given how controlling he was. Lamarr and Antheil's working relationship and friendship is important, but the damage done to their relationship by Lamarr's fear that he did see her as just a sexual object like so many others is resolved in less than a page. Mrs. Mayer, the wife of the head of MGM Studios, is interesting and instrumental in keeping Hedy from being another victim of her husband vanishes once Hedy's career gets off the ground.

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lainey_sherman3's review against another edition

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adventurous inspiring reflective sad tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? N/A
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.0

<spoiler?> My main criticism for this book is the fact that the author didn’t really expand the idea that Hedy Lemarr was a scientist. She mainly focused the plot on Hedy trying to survive in a man’s world where women are nothing more than pretty objects. By the time I got to the part where her scientific knowledge was being talked about, there was only about 50 pages left in the book so it seemed very rushed. If the story’s main selling point was that it was a feminist story about a woman who was an actress trying to make a name for herself during the war and who didn’t let the men control her, it would have be fine. But that wasn’t the case. The back of book states it’s based on a true story of a glamour icon and scientist. I feel that wasn’t the case and the author focused too much on her acting career, not her career as a scientist. <spoiler?>

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