Review by Booklist Review
Mose Sharp is the only boy among six sisters in a close-knit Jewish family in Valley Junction, Iowa. Dad dreams of Mose taking over the family business, but Mose has other plans. He heads for the vaudeville circuit and teams up with Rocky Carter. Carter and Sharp is what is known as a knockabout act, with Mose (now called Mike) playing straight man. Ten successful years in vaudeville take the two to radio, Broadway, and finally, in 1939, to Hollywood, where they churn out a series of feature films. After that comes a TV show. Meanwhile, Rocky drinks and goes through numerous wives, and Mike marries nice, artistic Jessica. But Mike's relationship with the volatile Rocky is the most enduring one he knows, and when the act breaks up in 1953, neither one ever gets over it. McCracken's book suffers from the problem that afflicts many novels covering long spans of time: time passes too quickly. This whistle-stop approach reduces the story's compellingness. Still, there are many good moments. --Mary Ellen Quinn
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Any doubts that McCracken could not equal the inventiveness, wit and quirky imagination of her first novel, The Giant's House, will be dispelled by this relentlessly eventful, rollickingly funny and heartwarming narrative. Her story about a pair of vaudeville comedians explores a symbiotic relationship in vigorous, expressive prose. Narrator Mose Sharp relates his life from childhood in Des Moines, Iowa, to old age in Hollywood in a distinctive, mordantly humorous voice. Pierced with remorse at the accidental death of his beloved sister, Hattie, 16-year-old Mose runs away from his gentle father and five remaining sisters to join the vaudeville circuit that he and Hattie had dreamed about. Later, down on his luck, he's taken under the wing of a plump comic, Rocky Carter, and they go on to become the famous team of Carter and Sharp. Though Mose is cast as a stern professor, and Rocky as the fat and hapless fall guy, in real life Rocky takes all the credit and a larger share of their income, and Mose is endlessly forgiving of Rocky's self-destructive behavior. In depicting the mingled love and resentment felt by both men, McCracken plumbs the soul of a relationship. She also chronicles the dying years of vaudeville with a tolerant eye for its desperate exuberance, and, when Carter and Sharp move on to Hollywood, the slaphappy 1940s movie industry. As years pass, Mose finds a wife, fathers children and grows rich, but his troubled partnership with Rocky remains the core of his existence. In its delicate balance of black humor, irony and pathos, this novel is as exhilarating as the waters of Niagara, its flow mimicking the tumultuous rush of time. Agent, Henry Dunow. (On-sale: Aug. 7) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
An act is a kind of marriage, says Mike Sharp, the straight man of the popular comedy team of Carter and Sharp in this novel set as his memoir. And so it is. Rocky Carter and Mike Sharp get together in the late 1920s just as vaudeville is beginning to fade. They manage to parlay their successful stage act into a long-running, if artistically unremarkable, movie career and later find some success in early television. Along with the ups and downs of their show business careers, McCracken's protagonist chronicles the changes in their private livesnotably the self-destructive Rocky's many marriages and heavy drinking set against Mike's own more stable marriage to Jessica, a dancer he meets on a trip back to his Iowa hometown. McCracken, whose first novel, The Giant's House, was a National Book Award finalist, has written a compelling and unexpectedly tender love story about the relationship between partners that is also a paean to an era of American popular entertainment. Recommended for all public libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/1/01.]Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
McCracken just may strike it rich with this enchantingly detailed and immensely appealing follow-up to the NBA-nominated The Giant's House (1996). Mose Sharp, half of the celebrated comedy team Carter and Sharp, tells their story 30 years after his estrangement from his partner Rocky Carter. McCracken has researched widely and well, and the story offers a delicious panorama of the American entertainment industry throughout the 20th century, as Mose, "a nice Jewish boy from Iowa who stumbled from one act to another," relates his experiences first as a nondescript vaudevillian and then as straight man to the ebullient Rocky. Visions of Abbott and Costello and/or Laurel and Hardy dance through the reader's head as the novel moves both backward and forward. We learn the roots of Mose's motivation in his relationship with his older sister (and mentor) Hattie, their five other sisters, and their stoical widowed father; we follow the team's upward mobility through the Midwest's vaudeville circuit, on radio (Rudy Vallee's show, then their own), in Hollywood, and eventually on television. Rocky goes through four wives, while Mose marries beautiful dance instructor Jessica Howard, fathers four children (three of whom survive), and ends the partnership when a justifiably aggrieved Rocky makes a damaging threat. The elegiac final 50 pages chronicle Rocky's inexplicable disappearance, Mose's continuing career as a movie character actor, and a wonderfully written halfhearted reconciliation attempt that takes place in, of all places, Reno, Nevada. The show-biz atmosphere is re-created with great skill. The comic routines McCracken devises for her protagonists (one of which provides her superb title) are suitably dated and groan-worthy, and the juxtapositions of Rocky's and Mose's gaudy public images with the scruffy realities of their private lives are charted with masterly precision and empathy. And what a movie this will make (there's a killer part for Nathan Lane). A career-making book that bears interesting comparison with both Philip Roth's I Married a Communist (1998) and Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000). This one is going places. Author tour
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Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Library Journal Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
