‘All the Broken Places’
By John Boyne
c. 2022, Pamela Dorman Books
$28/400 pages

It shall not pass your lips.

No, That Thing You Do Not Talk About is off-limits in all conversation, a non-topic when the subject surfaces. Truly, there are just certain things that are nobody’s business and in the new novel, “All the Broken Places” by John Boyne, some secrets must last a lifetime.

She hated the idea that she would have to adjust to new neighbors.

Ninety-one-year-old Gretel Fernsby wasn’t so much bothered by new people, as she was by new noise. She hated the thought of inuring herself to new sounds, and what if the new tenants had children? That was the worst of all. Gretel never was much for children, not her own and certainly not any living below her.

Once, there was a time when Gretel could imagine herself with many children. That was nearly 80 years ago, when she was in love with her father’s driver, Kurt. She thought about Kurt through the years – he had fallen out of favor with her father, and was sent elsewhere – and she wondered if he survived the war.

Her father didn’t, nor did her younger brother but Gretel didn’t think about those things. What happened at the “other place” was not her fault.

She hadn’t known. She was innocent.

That was what she told herself as she and her mother fled to Paris. Gretel was 15 then, and she worked hard to get rid of her German accent but not everyone was fooled by her bad French or her story. She was accosted, hated. As soon as her mother died, she sailed to Australia, where she lived with a woman who loved other women, until it became dangerous there, too. She practiced her English and moved to London where she was married, widowed, and now she had to get used to new neighbors and new sounds and new ways for old secrets to sneak into a conversation.

OK, clear your calendar. Get “All the Broken Places” and just don’t make any plans, other than to read and read and read.

The very first impression you get of author John Boyne’s main character, Gretel, is that she’s grumpy, awful, and nasty. With the many bon mots she drops, however, the feeling passes and it’s sometimes easy to almost like her – although it’s clear that she’s done some vile things in her lifetime, things that emerge slowly as the horror of her story dawns. Then again, she professes to dislike children, but (no spoilers here!) she doesn’t, not really, and that makes her seem like someone’s sweet old grandmother. ‘Tis a conundrum.

Don’t let that fool you, though. Boyne has a number of Gretel-sized roadside bombs planted along the journey that is this book. Each ka-boom will hit your heart a little harder.

This is a somewhat-sequel to “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas,” but you can read it alone. Do, and when you finish, you’ll want to immediately read it again, to savor anew.

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‘The Family Outing: A Memoir’
By Jessi Hempel
c. 2022, HarperOne
$27.99/320 pages

Don’t tell the children.

For most families in America in the last century, that was the maxim to live by: the kids are on a need-to-know basis and since they’re kids, they don’t need to know. And so what did you miss? Did you know about familial philanthropy, rebellion, embarrassment, poverty? As in the new memoir, “The Family Outing” by Jessi Hempel, did secrets between parent and child run both ways?

“What happened to me?”

That’s the big question Jessi Hampel had after many therapy sessions to rid herself of a recurring nightmare. She had plenty of good memories. Her recollection of growing up in a secure family with two siblings was sharp, wasn’t it?

She thought so – until she started what she called “The Project.”

With permission from her parents and siblings, Hempel set up Skype and Zoom sessions and did one-on-one interviews with her family, to try to understand why her parents divorced, why her brother kept mostly to himself, how the family dynamics went awry, why her sister kept her distance, and how secrets messed everything up.

Hempel’s father had an inkling as a young man that he was gay, but his own father counseled him to hide it. When he met the woman who would eventually be his wife, he was delighted to become a husband and father, as long as he could sustain it.

Years before, Hempel’s mother was your typical 1960s teenager with a job at a local store, a crush on a slightly older co-worker and, coincidentally, a serial killer loose near her Michigan neighborhood. Just after the killer was caught, she realized that the co-worker she’d innocently flirted with might’ve been the killer’s accomplice.

For nearly the rest of her life, she watched her back.

One secret, one we-don’t-discuss-it, and a young-adult Hempel was holding something close herself. What else didn’t she know? Why did she and her siblings feel the need for distance? She was trying to figure things out when the family imploded.

Ever had a dream that won’t stop visiting every night? That’s where author Jessi Hempel starts this memoir, and it’s the perfect launching point for “The Family Outing.”

Just prepare yourself. The next step has Hempel telling her mother’s tale for which, at the risk of being a spoiler, you’ll want to leave the lights on. This account will leave readers good and well hooked, and ready for the rest of what turns out to be quite a detective story.

And yet, it’s a ways away from the Sherlockian. Readers know what’s ahead, we know the score before we get there, but the entwining of five separate lives in a fact-finding mission makes this book feel as though it has a surprise at every turn.

Sometimes, it’s a good surprise. Sometimes, it’s a bad one.

A happily minimized amount of profanity and a total lack of overtness make “The Family Outing” a book you can share with almost anyone, adult, or ally. Read it, and you’ll be wanting to tell everyone.

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‘Hollywood: The Oral History’
By Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson
c. 2022, Harper
$30/741 pages

Whether you adore old Hollywood, are fascinated by 1970s new Hollywood, intrigued by digital filmmaking or love to hate on Tinsel Town, you’re in luck this holiday season.

Hollywood is “The most cruel, most despicable town in the world,” assistant director Ridgeway Callow says, in “Hollywood: The Oral History,” by Jeanine Basinger and Sam Wasson, a compendium of 100 years of gossip, reminiscences, and historical tidbits about Tinsel Town. At nearly 800 pages, it’s an intriguing, diverting doorstopper of a book.

Hollywood aficionados, especially Tinsel Town’s queer fans, will find it hard to resist this book. 

It’s often been said that there would be no Hollywood without us queer folk. “Hollywood: The Oral History” doesn’t explicitly mention Tinsel Town’s queer quotient. But you’ll find tantalizing hints of it, if you have queer radar.

If you believe that compiling a comprehensive history of Hollywood is a frivolous endeavor, you may well want to think again. 

Hollywood has been, and still is, (despite some progress) sexist, racist, homophobic, and transphobic. Not to mention its distortion of body image. And, that’s just a sampling of its sins.

Yet, Hollywood is everywhere. Whether you love movies (Old Hollywood films or the newest digital offerings), or loathe even the mention of the word “celluloid,” your life has been shaped by Hollywood.

Tinsel Town is in our DNA: from the words of endearment we whisper when we’re in love to the shade we throw during break-ups to the clothes we wear to our gestures of affection or rage.

In 1969, the American Film Institute held the first of a series of “intimate conversations” between AFI conservatory students and Hollywood professionals, Basinger and Wasson write in the introduction to “Hollywood: the Oral History.”

These conversations were named the Harold Lloyd Master Seminars “in honor of their very first guest,” Basinger and Wasson report.

During the past half century everyone from actors (including Meryl Streep, Dustin Hoffman, Greta Garbo, Katharine Hepburn, and, thankfully, Bette Davis) to directors (including George Cukor who directed Hepburn and Garbo), to costume designers (including Oscar-winning Edith Head) to producers as well as stunt men and women have talked about Hollywood.

“They speak with the attitudes of their own time,” Basinger and Wasson write, “but they speak with authority.”

Wasson and Basinger were given “unprecedented access” to the Harold Lloyd seminars, oral histories and complete archives. The more than 300 interviews for this remarkable book were culled from more than 3,000 seminar guest speakers and nearly 10,000 hours of conversation, the authors write.

The people speaking in this entertaining history aren’t actually hanging out – being interviewed together. Yet, it feels as if we’re a fly on the wall at a Tinsel Town pool party, as stars and their director/producer Hollywood pals sip martinis and gossip.

“The press did everything in the world to see that Joan Crawford and I had a big fight,” Bette Davis says.

“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” was made in three weeks, Davis says. There was no time for a feud, she adds. But, who knows what would have happened if “Baby” had taken three months to make, Davis asks.

This is just one of the many fun quotes in the fascinating interviews in “Hollywood: The Oral History.”

A caveat: Wasson, author of six books on film, including “Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.,” “Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and the “Dawn of the Modern Woman,” and Basinger, a trustee of the AFI and distinguished film scholar, offer scant context on the interviews in the book. There is, for example, little comment on the racism in “The Birth of a Nation” and “Gone with the Wind” or on homophobia in Hollywood. It’s understandable that the authors wanted the interviewees to speak for themselves (as part of their time). Yet, some historical context would have been welcome.

If you read “Hollywood: the Oral History” from beginning to end, you’ll likely feel that the party is going on too long. But if you read it in short bursts or dip in and out of it, you’ll find it a delicious treat.

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