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Summary
Summary
No one steps up to life's banquet, holds out her tray, and orders, "Grief, please!" But as a child, Candy Pekkala was served a heaping helping of it. Every buffet line has a dessert section, however, and when a cousin calls with a Hollywood apartment to sublet, it seems as though Candy is finally offered something sweet. It's good-bye to Minnesota and hello to California, where a girl who has always lived by her wits has a real chance of making a living with them. With that, the irrepressible Lorna Landvik launches her latest irresistible character onto the world stage--or at least onto the dimly lit small stage where stand-up comedy gets its start.
Herself a comic performer, Landvik taps her own adventurous past and Minnesota roots to conjure Candy's life in this strange new Technicolor home. Her fellow tenants at Peyton Hall include a female bodybuilder, a ruined nightclub impresario, and a well-connected Romanian fortune-teller. There are game show appearances and temp jobs at a record company and an establishment suspiciously like the Playboy Mansion, and of course the alluring but not always welcoming stage of stand-up comedy. As she hones her act, Candy is tested by humiliation, hecklers, and the inherent sexism that insists "chicks aren't funny."
Written with the light touch and quiet wisdom that have made her works so popular, this is classic Lorna Landvik--sometimes so funny, you'll cry; sometimes so sad, you might as well laugh; and always impossible to put down.
Author Notes
Author Lorna Lanvik was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1954. After high school graduation, she and a friend traveled in Europe and settled in Bavaria where they worked as hotel chamber maids and English tutors. After returning to the United States, she briefly attended the University of Minnesota before moving to San Francisco to perform stand-up and improvisational comedy. She moved to Los Angeles, where she did stand-up comedy at the Comedy Store and The Improv as well as worked a variety of temporary jobs including one at the Playboy Mansion and another at Atlantic Records.
She is an actor and playwright who has performed in plays she has written and produced. She has appeared in numerous plays including Bad Seed, Lunatic Cellmates, and Valley of the Dolls. She has written six novels and currently lives in Minneapolis with her husband and two daughters.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Kirkus Review
Landvikplaywright, actor and author of comic novelsdelivers a semiautobiographical tale about a young woman who follows her showbiz dreams in 1970s Hollywood.Candy Pekkalahalf Korean, half Norwegian but all Minnesotanhas a college degree and no idea what comes next. When she's offered the sublet of her cousin's Hollywood digs, Candy moves to LA and Peyton Hall, a storied apartment building that once housed movie stars and is in some ways the real star of the novel. The current residents are less illustrious: Madame Pepper, a clairvoyant who advised old Hollywood; Ed, a substitute teacher who's won a fortune on game shows; Maeve, the bodybuilding daughter of a TV soap star; Francis, the long-ago proprietor of LA's ritziest nightclub. Peyton Hall's aura inspires Candy to follow her long-buried ambition to give stand-up comedy a try. As she hones her act, Candy gets the kind of temp work found only in LA: stints at a record label and a literary agency; and a job labeling VHS tapes at a stand-in for the Playboy mansion. All this glitz and all the new friends she makes under the night-blooming jasmine transform Candywho was a lonely child and drug-addled teeninto a confident young woman who can take her late mother's advice that it's best to laugh. Though Landvik offers an amiable stroll through Candy's growing success, not everything works; a heavy reliance on diary entries and clunky comedy passages detract from an otherwise pleasant portrait of the quirky residents of a since-demolished Hollywood landmark. Landvik's novel is happily filled with a double dose of nostalgiathe protagonist's for the golden age of Hollywood and the author's for a lovably gritty 1970s Los Angeles. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Landvik's roman à clef about her ancillary career as a stand-up comedian follows Korean American Candy Pekkala, who, from childhood, has always used her quick-with-the-quips wit to defuse painful situations. Though psychically scarred by the death of her Korean mother when Candy was only five and emotionally wary from the distance the death created between Candy and her ex-GI father, she hones her comic chops as much as she can in small-town Minnesota. A once-in-a-lifetime chance to live in Los Angeles brings Candy to one of Hollywood's most historic apartment buildings, whose been-there, done-that residents expose her to a world that leads to her arriving at the famed Comedy Store's doorstep. Success comes relatively quickly to the sharp-tongued slip of a girl, whose nightly improvisational put-downs earn her a loyal audience. Filled with historical lore about Hollywood's glory days, inside observations about the chauvinism that pervades the comedy boys' club, and a bevy of secondary characters straight out of central casting, Landvik's homage to funny ladies everywhere is a joyful, breezy trip down memory lane.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2014 Booklist
