Thursday 3 January 2013

Chanel Bonfire by Wendy Lawless

ISBN: 9781451675368
Publisher: Gallery Books
Pages: 304

By the time Wendy Lawless turned seventeen, she'd known for quite some time that she didn't have a normal mother. But that didn't stop her from wanting one.

Georgann Rea didn't bake cookies or go to PTA meetings; she wore a mink coat and always had a lit Dunhill plugged into her cigarette holder. She had slept with too many men, and some women, and she didn't like dogs or children. Georgann had the ice queen beauty of a Hitchcock heroine and the cold heart to match.

In this evocative, darkly humorous memoir, Wendy deftly charts the highs and lows of growing up with her younger sister in the shadow of an unstable, fabulously neglectful mother. Georgann, a real-life Holly Golightly who constantly reinvents herself as she trades up from trailer-park to penthouse, suffers multiple nervous breakdowns and suicide attempts, while Wendy tries to hide the cracks in their fractured family from the rest of the world.

Chanel Bonfire depicts a childhood blazed through the refined aeries of The Dakota and the swinging townhouses of London, while the girls' beautiful but damned mother desperately searches for glamour and fulfilment. Ultimately, they must choose between living their own lives and being their mother's warden.

I received an ARC copy of Chanel Bonfire by Wendy Lawless for review from Gallery Books, which is an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Although Chanel Bonfire wasn’t the type of book that I would normally read, I thoroughly enjoyed reading it! I loved reading about the different places where Wendy had lived & visited, as well as all the different celebrities that Wendy had met, as they were described quite meticulously and honestly. I really like the cover of Chanel Bonfire as it represents one of the main events in the book well, and I love the colours, especially the sepia shades.

Available at Amazon.co.uk.

No comments:

Post a Comment