The Only Woman in the Room: Marie Benedict (A book based on a true story)

While I was quickly swept away in the story, my involvement and engrossment quickly dissolved into me simply reading to finish the story. The book was quick to engage and quick to disengage.

My first issue was with the character Hedy. She had no depth, no development, no engaging characteristics. She was a one-dimensional, uninspiring character, which was incredibly disappointing considering Hedy Lamarr's life. Even when Hedy begins developing the plans for the torpedoes, she remains seemingly impassive and unattached to her story. I believe this was due to some weak character sketching of the author. The character didn't seem to care about what was happening in her life, so I didn't either.

While the events in the book were wrought with suspense, the book was not. Marrying a powerful political man at the start of WWII, and then planning an escape after discovering his true character should be thrilling, and that's not including all of the politics involved in Hedy's life. However, I was left disappointed after a quick page summarized the escape attempts. When the escape was successful, there were no details as to how Hedy got to where she was. Readers are expected to guess? Or to not want to understand how Hedy succeeded. It makes a very real story sound very unreal, which leads to a very boring story.

The book feels to be in chunks: before marriage, marriage, crumbling of marriage, success in Hollywood, torpedoes. Each chunk seems like a separate book, and the only thing connecting each one is a page or two, which isn't enough to carry readers through the story of Hedy's life.

I'm sure trying to write a book about a real person who had real-world impact while keeping the book under the "Fiction" category is incredibly hard and time-consuming. An author can't make too much up about the character because she existed in the real-world. This is where artistic license comes in. I think much more could have been done to make Hedy's story more enjoyable, educational, and exciting had the author attemped to delve more into the person of Hedy.

As I read, I was keeping in mind this challenge, trying to figure out what prompt I could put it under. When I finished, I read through the acknowledgements where the first sentence is "The opportunity to share the incredible legacy of Hedy Lamarr, both historic and modern..." This led to me Googling Hedy Lamarr and discovering that she was indeed a real person! Color me surprised! I had never heard of her before. The most disappointing part of this book was that I learned more about Hedy through her Wikipedia page than I did in the book. However, I was glad to learn that this book was based on a true story, so that I could count it towards my reading resolution!