Hidden Stars and Veiled Faces
The proper young women of New York’s Barbizon Hotel all had secrets to keep—especially in 1952 when the city’s unsavory night life lured them into its grip. Decades later, a young journalist living in one of the Barbizon’s converted condos sets out to unearth these secrets, discovering that veils can hide more than scarred faces, and that her own secrets have wrapped a web of deceit around her. Fiona Davis braids the stories of these women together in her novel, The Dollhouse . Told with alternating points-of-view, the reader travels gracefully between decades and characters, between secrets and truth. Author Corinne Joy Brown also delves into decades, even centuries, of hidden stories, perhaps never imagining as she was writing Hidden Star , that her novel’s main character (with a shadowy family history of Jewish persecution) would step so readily from the novel’s fictitious pages and into today’s headlines. Another Jewish cemetery vandalized. Muslims reach out to h