By Karen Abbott, Random House, $26.00, 448 pages
I have always been a huge fan of biographies, so I jumped at the chance to read American Rose about the life of performer Gypsy Rose Lee. I didn’t know much about her before reading this book and sadly, I don’t feel like I know much about her now. Author Karen Abbott was extremely detailed and the book was well written. The issue is the book has no order. The story is hard to follow because it jumps from talking about Lee to randomly discussing when her mother and father met. The book didn’t provide any guidance in telling the story and often left me wondering what was going on. By the end of the novel I truly didn’t know any more about Lee than when I first started.
Abbott should have written the book in chronological order so that readers could identify the key points in the life of Gypsy Rose Lee, without having to reread chapters to understand all of the events of her life. While beautifully written, the book was hard to follow and if you want to learn about the life of Gypsy Rose Lee, I suggest you find a different book.
Reviewed by Nicole Will