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bethreadsandnaps 's review for:
The Queen of Sugar Hill
by ReShonda Tate
4.25 ⭐️
Debut novelist ReShonda Tate delivers Hattie McDaniel’s story after she won the Oscar.
➕ Hattie McDaniel is a nuanced and fascinating individual, and that comes through in this novel. The author doesn’t paint her as perfect, which I really appreciated.
➕ If you love old Hollywood, this is the book for you! I learned so much. Granted, I had heard most of the names dropped, but I didn’t know their stories before reading this: Clark Gable, Lena Horne, Carole Lombard, Dorothy Dandridge, and more!
➕ I loved how this historical fiction novel took on the heat McDaniel received from her detractors, most notably the NAACP. It fully explored the issue. McDaniel desperately wanted to work as an actress, and she took on many roles in movies as a servant. Her detractors did not like that she took these roles because they felt she kept Black people down. This novel’s point is that the real enemy was the white studio system, but this fighting between the factions kept them from seeing the real enemy. It very much relates to issues we see today.
➕ This was excellent on audio. The narrator performed this novel perfectly.
➖ I think this related to the information the author could find, but I felt like so many HUGE things were covered in such few pages, and we learned so little about McDaniel that took place BEFORE 1940 (when she was already in her 40s). The title and cover relate to a landmark lawsuit she was involved in, and it was blink-and-you-miss-it in the book. I would have loved for that to have taken more prominence with less prominence given to the crappy men in her life.
All in all, if you want an accessible book about 1940s Hollywood and civil rights, this will be right up your alley!