The Magnificent Esme Wells audiobook

There are characters who come to life because you feel their loneliness or their desire for riches or fame, or you know that moment of reckoning when they know that a single, crucial decision is the one that will seal their fate. This is historical fiction with a fabulous sense of time and place that takes the reader to Hollywood of the late 1930’s and the beginnings of Las Vegas as the gambling mecca in the 1940’s and early 1950’s . Adrienne Sharp brings all of this to us with fantastic descriptive writing. In 1939 California, Esme is 6 and her parents have big dreams . She’s caught up in them, living a vagabond life as they move from place to place, while her father tries to make his fortune at the racetrack and her mother as a dancer with dreams of bigger roles in a movie . This is negligent parenting for sure as Esme follows her mother from movie set to movie set or as she picks up tickets off the ground for her father at the racetrack. Esme is a lonely little girl pulled along into her parents’ empty dreams, kept out of school, getting her education on the movie set, at the racetrack and later in the casinos of Las Vegas. The narrative alternates between these years as we learn what happened in Hollywood that bring Esme and her father to Las Vegas. At 15, she becomes a showgirl armed only with her beauty, her savvy, and her instinctual ability to read this place and the people who work there. Her coming of age is heartbreaking at times. This is a fantastic depiction of old Hollywood and a history lesson in how Vegas grew out of the desert on the strings of organized crime. It is also about this one family, probably like so many others who hitched their dreams of fame and money to the Vegas lights. But it is also about loss, about unconditional love and for me an unforgettable character. I received an advanced copy of this book from HarperCollins through Edelweiss.

I just loved this coming of age story about Esme. Her family may not have been a conventional one but it was her family. Her father was a strong presence in her life. Again, he may not have won any "best father of the year" awards but he still loved Esme. Esme got her beauty from her mother. This proved to be both a good thing and a bad thing. It attracted men like Nate. He had the whole mobster/gangster vibe about him. He is the type that could eat Esme up and spit her out but Esme showed strength until the end. I was vibing with all of the characters. They really brought to life the story. Thus making it such an easy and enjoyable time reading this book. The Magnificent Esme Wells is a memorable book filled with engaging characters that will stick with you even after the last page has been read!

I was provided a galley from Harper Books in exchange for an honest review.The Magnificent Esme Wells by Adrienne Sharp was a very enjoyable jaunt into historical fiction.  For me personally, this had all of the right ingredients for a strong historical fiction read. The Golden Age of Hollywood.  Gangsters. The creation and rise of Las Vegas.  Showgirls. It was all morphed into a great fictional account of the time featuring an honest, witty, and intriguing narrator in Esme Wells.  Esme takes the reader between Hollywood and Las Vegas so the story alternates in time.  I really liked this feature of the story because part of what Sharp is trying to do is compare the power and crookedness of Hollywood and Vegas; primarily through Hollywood moguls like Louis B. Mayer and casino bosses/gangsters.  As much reading as I have done on both of those subjects the comparison, while it seems obvious, did not entirely occur to me until now.  They were all immigrants, most were Jewish and they are responsible for their own fortunes.  They also, ultimately, experienced sad downfalls of their power.Along with a fascinating account of Hollywood and Las Vegas, this novel is also a story of dreamers.  Esme's parents have dreams.  They are lofty dreams that consume them.  Dina Wells wants to be one of Louis B. Mayers MGM stars.  She is not satisfied with being just another dancer on the lot.  She wants her name at the top of the marquee.  Ike Silver is looking for money and power.  However, he cannot stay away from the race track and his next big win.  Both of her parents are desperate to achieve their dreams so much so that they let it consume them.  I am not giving away much when I admit that neither of them are huge successes.  Despite being along for the ride of constant failure, Esme has her own goals; which involve becoming a Las Vegas star.  I enjoyed this one.  I had not really read a historical fiction like this in awhile.  I had some heavier topic driven reads before picking this one up so it was nice to follow up with this.  However, much to my dismay, Esme's story ends on a sad one.  I will not give specifics but I will end by saying that in Vegas...the house always wins.I will give it a 3.5.

Great bookWeird ending

Parents who neglect their children might still provide them with a powerful education, as Adrienne Sharp’s new novel illustrates in stunning and heartbreaking prose. Esme Wells, the first-person narrator of The Magnificent Esme Wells, is a devoted student of her parents’ aspirations – her mother dreams as her father schemes. Her mother, Dina Wells, dreams of the screen test that will transport her from the dance line into glow of the big screen as an authentic actress. Ike Silver schemes to make it big financially – through gambling, first on horse races and then at casino tables in Las Vegas, or more legitimately, with a taxi business one day. Dina and Ike ferry Esme around with them as they grow their hopes and aspirations. As neglectful parents, Dina and Ike fail to enroll Esme in school or give her the normal kind of routine that children thrive on. Yet the reader can’t help but absorb in her narration the intense love and devotion Esme feels for her parents as she observes them and cajoles and performs to seek their approval. In one notable scene taking place early in the narrative, Ike drives to the top of Mulholland Drive in Los Angeles, where he, Dina, and Esme sometimes park and look down at the lights of the city. Esme allows herself an odd flight of fancy about the ghost of a Hollywood starlet wannabe who jumps off the “H” of the Hollywood sign, something that Esme can view out the window of the back seat of the car she sits in. But she calms herself with the view of her parents, “the two of them sitting side by side on the hood, my father’s arm about my mother’s shoulders, keeping her there and nowhere else, their bodies silhouetted against the yellow city lights that winked before them and the white stars that had begun to offer their light from above.” After a moment, Esme knocks on the windscreen, “wanting to be part of that embrace.” Her mother responds by kissing the windscreen. For that moment, Esme feels wrapped in an extension of their love, and for that moment also, she is buoyed up by the hope and possibility that have infused the life her parents seek. While she may not be the center of their universe, she makes herself effervescent in their lives and affection. In addition to the focus on familial dynamics and the quest for success, this novel captures the pungent landscapes of Los Angeles and Las Vegas in the late 1940’s and early fifties. Sharp paints in alternately colorful and stark terms the intricacies of the period. An early scene depicts a meeting of Nazi sympathizers, a meeting which Esme stumbles into after hiding in the back seat of her father’s car to follow him on an adventure. In the chaos of the meeting, she becomes the blonde-haired, blue-eyed seeming Aryan child seized upon by audience members before the anti-Nazi protestors enter the hall, her father among them.Throughout the novel, Esme observes at close quarters the brutalities of the Jewish mobsters who are trying to climb to the top of the Los Angeles and Las Vegas money heaps. Yet her sometimes naïve observations about the men in her father’s life and their work are juxtaposed with a spate of misfortune that threatens the stability of her own nuclear family. And the novel flashes on Jews in crisis on another continent even as it presents Jews behaving badly in Los Angeles and Las Vegas, all through the eyes of Esme, whose narration, while primarily reliable, is infused with empathy for her parents, who have engendered in her their same dreaming and scrabbling temperament.The newly minted adult Esme begins a relationship with the powerful Nate Stein, a relationship that serves as the learning curve she must ride before she comprehends how dark the moment of a dream’s dissolution can be. With vivid settings in Los Angeles and Las Vegas and a historical look at World-War II issues resonating to the present time, The Magnificent Esme Wells provides a long, thoughtful drink about what it means to seek out hope and light in the new desert world where the rules change as often as the players, where the wolves you know may be just as dangerous as the ones outside your door.

I feel that I should preface this review with a full disclosure that I have a great amount of love and nostalgia for Las Vegas. I first traveled there with my mom for my 21st birthday many years ago (over two decades, gah) and going once or twice a year thereafter for at least ten years. I remember visiting several of the hotels featured in the novel, most which no longer exist. It's not high on my travel priority list anymore, but I think on it fondly and love most things associated with the City of Lights. Esme is a powerful narrator with a distinct voice. Sharp renders her with such strength and courage, while being one of the most tragic characters I've read in a long time. A dual timeline is employed to great effect, slowly gathering tension towards the conclusion of her mother's story in Hollywood during Esme's childhood, and the conclusion of her own story in Las Vegas as a young woman. I found myself more engaged with Esme as an adult in Vegas. Although I am a fan of old Hollywood historical fiction (see also: Beautiful Ruins, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and films like L.A. Confidential), the Hollywood storyline is centered around Esme's parents and upbringing which are both deplorable. The early part of the novel focuses heavily on this period, so it took awhile to warm up. Once things turn more towards her coming of age, and the crises Esme faces during the fascinating coming of age of Las Vegas, I began turning the pages in rapid succession, desperate to learn of her fate. "I didn't know yet how these men were protective of little girls but preyed upon them when they grew up. But you couldn't stop growing up. The transition from girlhood to womanhood turned on a pivot. One day you were a child and then, all at once, you weren't."Esme's narration feels almost as if she is an outside observer to her own life. One could take that as detachment, but I thought that it lent even more empathy towards her character because she was clearly not in control of her life for much of the novel. And many of the circumstances in which she had to bear witness were so tragic that her detachment can be seen as a defense mechanism, the most pivotal of which is disclosed near the end of the novel and it brought tears to my eyes. Overall, it was darker than I had anticipated, yet a mesmerizing read.Many thanks to the great people at Harper Books for sending me an advance copy in exchange for my honest review!For more reviews and bookish musings visit: http://www.bornandreadinchicago.com/

I wish I could give this six stars, that's how much I enjoyed it, although enjoyed may be the wrong word. Engaged, involved, page turner, historically interesting may be far more accurate descriptors. This is your next book club book, especially if you happen to have a group at your synagogue.Esme Singer is the daughter of parents who were searching for more than the immigrant dream of a little business, a nice house and children who do better than they do. Esme's father wants a big payoff through gambling and connections in the Jewish mob. It is a "career: that involves him with unsavory gonifs (thieves). Her mother was the prettiest girl in an LA Jewish neighborhood with aspirations of stardom. What she lacked was talent. Against the wishes of her parents, she marries the wannabe gangster and the two ride a lifelong rollercoaster of highs and financial lows. Esme, unschooled and neglected, tags along with her parents until her mother dies and she becomes her father's shadow. She also becomes the mascot of bigtime gangsters such as Bennie "Bugsy" Siegel and, consequently, is there for the birth of Las Vegas.Every dealer, counterman, and showgirl knows Esme as she grows from child to adolescent to adult. Emotionally immature, but physically adventurous, and well-connected, Esme's "backers" get her jobs on-stage and ultimately, an intimate relationship makes her a major star on the Strip -- -- and of the "strip". Now Esme is party to more than she ever wanted to be and learns the real character of the men who run Vegas and how their loyalties quickly turn on each other, her father, and on her.The author has stayed accurate to the real development of Vegas, and tying it to the development of the atom bomb is an intriguing twist. The events have been condensed into the earliest years of the 1950s but the feel of sunburst clocks and mid-century furniture permeates the book. Esme's personal and emotional development is the center of the book and will keep you wondering how the feral child will turn out. It is enough to say that Esme has learned her lessons from the very best and executes them to her ultimate benefit, even though she loses much of herself in the process.I highly recommend this book especially for its insights into post-Was America and how the American dream became the American drama.

Esme Silver was the only child of two young people who wanted nothing but fame and fortune. Her beautiful mother, Dina Wells, was a showgirl who tried to become a famous actress. Her handsome father, Ike Silver, was a gambler who wanted to become one of the big shots with mobster Bugsy Siegel. This left Esme trailing behind, forgotten, as her parents strove toward their dreams. Of course, as Esme became older, she followed the only things she knew, crime and fame.This story is told in two parts, vacillating between Los Angeles in 1939, when Esme was very young, and Las Vegas in the early 1950’s, as she pursues as career of her own. The story is told little-by-little, revealing details that clarify the story, making the book impossible to put down. It is an exciting and enticing tale in and of itself.But, it is also a vivid historical fiction account about the widespread power and control of the mafia in Hollywood and in Las Vegas during and after World War II. and the forces, like the Kefauver Crime Committee, that tried to curb their power and control. The imagery in this book is so vivid and the story lines so good, that I think that this book would make a great movie!In any case, I fell in love with the persistent Esme, with her dry sense of humor and her street smarts. ‘Watching’ her grow up in this book was both heart-warming and heart-breaking.I was given a free copy of this book in exchange for an unbiased review.

** spoiler alert ** A dazzling, bittersweet story of family, love, and deception. We follow Esme, the irrepressible daughter of a Mafia gofer and a Busby Berkeley showgirl, as she comes of age amid racetracks and casinos, mobsters and starlets, on her path to becoming the first burlesque artist on the Las Vegas Strip. Young Esme Wells spends her days where no child should. She wanders the Hollywood Park racetrack trailing her gambling-obsessed father, and the MGM soundstages following her too-beautiful chorus-girl mother, both parents bit players in the big, jostling worlds of mobsters and movie moguls of late 1930s Los Angeles. Illiterate, unkempt, intelligent, and willful, Esme is as ambitious as her parents, and these three opportunists struggle to force the world to open up its fortunes to them. When her father moves to Las Vegas just after the war--to help Bugsy Siegel open his famous Flamingo Hotel--Esme accompanies him. And there, the daughter, now a stunner like her mother, catches the attention of one of the new Strip's most powerful men. Narrated by the twentysomething Esme, The Magnificent Esme Wells moves between pre-WWII Hollywood and postwar Las Vegas--a golden age when gangsters and movie moguls were often indistinguishable in their scramble for power. Esme's voice--sharp, observant, with a quiet, mordant wit--chronicles the rise and fall and further fall of her complicated parents, as well as of her own painful reckoning with love and life. A coming-of-age story.

Esme has pretty much relied on herself her whole young life. Her dad is a hustler who worked the track and a million other schemes and her mother is a glamorous wannbe actress who will use whatever means available to get herself a casting call. Life is not easy for the family so when family friend Bugsy Siegel offers Esme's dad a piece of the action at the new hotel he is opening in the desert - off they go to Las Vegas. Esme goes from "Baby E" to a showgirl after meeting a dangerous player and soon learns that you have to play the game to win the game. She is smart, she is beautiful and she could be very powerful if she doesn't fall prey to the dangers of all that glitter and endless parties.As fast as her rise to stardom is, the fall can be even faster. Starting with the golden age of Hollywood to the glamorous world of the early Las Vegas strip - Esme Wells is a study of family both the one you are born with and the one you choose. She compares her relationships to that of her parents all the while looking for love and acceptance she didn't find at home. My thanks to the publisher for the advance copy.

If you love novels with a razor-keen eye to historical detail and unforgettable characters, this book is a must-read. Set in late 1930s Los Angeles and early 1950s Las Vegas, the story follows the unlikely rise of Esme Wells, daughter of two dysfunctional but charismatic parents, teenage Vegas showgirl during the early rise of the The Strip, and lover to one of the most successful and ruthless mafia kingpins who raised Sin City from the desert sands.Sharp has uncanny ability to conjure the language, atmosphere and physical attributes of a pre-WWII Los Angeles -- basking in the glory days of MGM and the old star system -- to the diamond-in-the-rough formation of Las Vegas from a dusty train stop to the glittering metropolis it would one day become.Her main character, Esme Wells, is a force of nature -- traumatized, talented, ambitious, needy, and iron-willed -- who ultimately triumphs in her journey through two of America's most memorable cities.

Wow! I read this entire book in two days and it was amazing! You must read it - you can see and hear everything--beautiful description, coupled with crisp dialogue and interesting people. The characters climbed into my dreams and I loved going back and forth between Los Angeles and Las Vegas and between Esme's story and her mom and dad's. The history also made me feel like I was learning something by experiencing these events in a new way. It read like a cool movie and I could hear the voiceovers and see the fabulous costumes of the showgirls. I really hope they do make it into a movie after it becomes a best seller. I think Adrienne Sharp is a wonderful and talented author. I have read all of her other books too. I can't wait for the next one.

In her 4th book, Adrienne Sharp once again uses her incredible background in the world of dance and performance to weave her story. In this novel, she sees through the eyes of The Magnificent Esme Wells, a young girl watching her parents struggle to hit it big on the movie stage and at the horse track in 1930's Los Angeles, and then, when that fails, trying to make it big herself while caught up in the seedy underbelly of 1950's Las Vegas. As the story alternates between those time periods, readers see that Esme never really gets to be a child and is forced to grow up too fast in the gangster controlled desert of Las Vegas. Great description, strong characters, and a peek into the backstage life of showgirls that is rarely exposed.

Hard, violent, beautiful, scary, sweet, sad, and disturbing. I loved it! I loved the education I got about this time period, the birth of Las Vegas, the lives of the con men and women, and the sad pursuit of show business. Esme is my girl! I loved how she made her way in a world that no little girl should even be in. Her parents were hardly her caretakers, usually the roles were reversed. She took care of both of them, and sadly, I don't think they ever appreciated her for all she did and was for them. I was reminded of little Drew Barrymore in Paper Moon - and kept picturing her in Esme's role. I want to believe Esme emerged as a new creation - and could lead a happy life - after her liberation from that world. A super read.

This was an engaging story, and, at first I thought it was nonfiction. I can’t say there was much profound about it. The sleazy underworld of Las Vegas gangsters of the 1950s was definitely sleazy and violent. It was not at all aggrandized, and there wasn’t really redemption in the end. The book was just a nice “slice-of-life” read about a young woman who had to navigate that world. I guess if I were her I might not have tried that hard to save my father, but it’s not like he was any worse than the others trying to get rich through gambling and controlling the available vices in the world around them.

The Magnificent Esme Wells is a refreshing take on the pursuit of the American Dream. Its main characters are small time gamblers and dancers chasing fame and fortune on LA movie sets in 1939 and in the nascent, postwar Las Vegas casinos. In layering the two time periods, Ms. Sharp skillfully exposes the psychological and cultural roots of Esme’s adult decisions while simultaneously building tension in the story. Esme is vulnerable yet unflinchingly irreverent, and I couldn’t help admiring her ability to ensnare even as she was becoming trapped herself.