Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Be warned: this book is not a biography of Milicent Patrick, nor is she even given center stage for the majority of it – she makes an entrance about a hundred pages in – and when she is allowed this, her various experiences and thoughts are as often as not based on supposition. The book is an unstructured mess – a mish-mosh of irrelevant facts and subjective assumptions… not about Milicent Patrick’s contributions – those have long been a given – but about what she must have thought, how she must have felt, or even why she must have worn a particular outfit to work. (Strict studio dress-codes not considered.) The quality of the writing alone is jarring. Poor sentence structure halts any sense of flow in the prose, to the point where it actually interrupts the narrative and causes one to mentally edit for clarity as a line is reread. The book reads like a first draft very much in need of an editor. The author's frequency of editorializing is misplaced and further harms the experience, alternating between conversational and snide with no structural motivation. We’re often treated to irrelevant minutia of the author’s life that goes on for pages. For example, we get a lengthy explanation of why the author got a certain tattoo – this in a book about the life and work of someone else. There’s three pages of the author recounting her feelings seeing Fantasia for the first time. Really? The last thing an author should want to do while writing about someone else, is infuse the pages with asides that butt in with: “Now here’s more about ME!”. There are continuous lapses into long, often condescending anecdotes from the author’s life that have nothing to do with Milicent Patrick. The author rambles from one irrelevant bit of Hollywood history to another, excessively padding the work, then dives into a rant about the way things are and cuts back to Millicent Patrick several pages later, picking her up in mid-scene. This is not the scholarly work the subject rightfully deserves. Rather, it is a personal and prolonged op ed marketed as an item of genre interest with occasional redirects toward what we were told would be the subject. Most of the footnotes are intended to interject humor – unsuccessfully – rather than informational detail. Milicent Patrick does deserve another text about her work and experience. (There are others.) Unfortunately, this isn't it. The author spends most of our time talking about looking for information on Milicent Patrick, and relatively little time on the subject herself. Putting in a lot of effort does not, in and of itself, guarantee success. I approached this book hoping to learn more about her than I had already found over the years - (she's not unknown, in spite of the author's late-to-the-party standpoint) - only to realize I had already learned more on my own than this book was able to divulge. (There is quite a bit online and in older histories for anyone knowing how to research, rendering this particular book inadequate.) The interesting bits about CFBL are culled from other, better sources and merely repeated here. I did collaterally learn more than was called for about Milicent's contrary father... which is not in any way why one would buy this book... but which did help to hammer home the author's real point that professional women's lives are beset by men who can't deal with women in their profession – true... but again, not nearly enough about Milicent herself. The author would do well to read several other biographies to get a sense of best approach. She clearly wanted to write about herself and her own experiences, and Milicent Patrick’s story served only as an occasional template. Note to author: a book about a sole historic figure should be limited to that historic figure and the people/times around her/him. If you have an ax to grind, write THAT book. If you want to write about someone else’s life, write THAT book. Don’t mix them up. There are the basics of two very different and potentially better books within this unstructured one. Between this bait-and-switch in the book's marketing and the awkwardness of the writing, I cannot recommend this book. Which is too bad. I went in wanting to like it.