Did You Hear About Kitty Karr?

I needed a good fiction book and wow, this one delivered! This book is kind of like a mashup of The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo and The Vanishing Half. (Those are two of my favorite books, so this is a high praise!). The story starts a little bit slowly and is told in dual timelines. We meet Elise St. John, a wealthy Black actress in Hollywood. And then we meet Hazel and her daughter Mary Magdalene, two Black women navigating the Jim Crow south in the fifties. Hazel is a maid, working for a wealthy tobacco family. Mary Magdalene was the product of rape. In modern day, we learn that the famous white starlet Kitty Karr has passed away… leaving her entire (multi-million dollar) estate to Elise and her three sisters. This confuses the world: why would Karr do this? Is there something unsavory going on? Meanwhile, the St. John sisters have questions of their own. Elise is already dealing with stress in her own personal life (a cheating fiance, social media controversy!); the last thing she wants to do is sort out Kitty’s affairs and deal with the press. But when Elise discovers one of Kitty’s old journals, secrets that rock her world and could change absolutely everything about the world she knows come out. We go back in time to the segregated South, through LA in the sixties, and modern day. The story is all-consuming… I absolutely devoured it and found myself still thinking about it days after I finished.