Review: A Tender Thing

A Tender Thing by Emily Neuberger
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Emily Neuberger has written a polished and quietly powerful novel of historical fiction in A Tender Thing. Built around the idea of a young actress and singer who leaves the Midwest to try to become a Broadway star in the 1950s, the novel's skillful take on the racism of the era is deftly woven through the story. Eleanor O'Hanlon has grown up with one true love in her life- musical theater. After traveling to NYC with her lifelong friend Rosie and attending several auditions, she captures the eye of Don Mannheim, a famous composer who has long been one of Eleanor's favorites. Soon she is cast in a new musical, "A Tender Thing," in the starring role of Molly, a young woman who falls in love with a black man, Luke, and defies society's expectations by wanting to marry him. Initially, the novel appears to be about Eleanor having to overcome her own beliefs about African-Americans but the novel digs far deeper than that. It examines the theater community's limiting perceptions of race and sexual orientation and the ugliness of Jim Crow laws that were still very much a part of the era in the Northeast.

Neuberger manages to capture Eleanor's almost childlike naïveté about the world she has entered without making her seem unappealing. Better still, her single-mindedness is never so blindered that she is rendered unsympathetic. Most of the secondary characters like Don and Charles are well-developed. While I could quibble with a few of the other characters who seemed thin on the page (Rosie and Tommy, in particular), overall the book is successful in capturing an era in which Broadway thrived and society was on the cusp of change.

The audiobook, narrated by the author, is well done, though the sung passages, heavy on a thin soprano voice with excessive vibrato, were not that pleasing to my ear. Thankfully, they were present only briefly.

I received a Digital Review Copy and a paper review copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

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