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WORK TITLE: The Unforgettable Loretta Darling
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WEBSITE: https://katherineblakeauthor.com/
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PERSONAL
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and publishing consultant. Speckled Pen, London, England, founder. Has appeared on podcasts, including the Bestseller Experiment and PrePublished.
AWARDS:Bookseller Rising Star award.
WRITINGS
Has written children’s books under the name, Karen Ball. Also, author of a biweekly newsletter.
SIDELIGHTS
Katherine Blake is a writer and publishing consultant based in London, England. The name is a pseudonym for Karen Ball. Under the Ball name, she has written over two dozen books for children. She is the founder of a publishing consultancy called the Speckled Pen, through which she edits, proofreads, and manages projects for major publishers and authors. The books she works with through her consultancy range from children’s volumes to adult novels. In addition to writing and consulting, Blake/Ball has also appeared on podcasts, including the Bestseller Experiment and PrePublished. The Speckled Pen won a Bookseller Rising Star award.
In 2024, Blake released the adult volume, The Unforgettable Loretta Darling: A Novel. Set in 1950, the book finds a young Englishwoman named Margaret arriving in Los Angeles, CA. Margaret makes the journey with money she obtained from Jimmie, a con artist whom she blackmailed. When she lands in the U.S., Margaret begins going by the name, Loretta. Though she has significant, and potentially dangerous, skills as an herbalist, Loretta is determined to join the entertainment industry as a makeup artist. She begins apprenticing with a respected makeup artist named Alecs. Meanwhile, Loretta marries a handsome but untrustworthy man named Raphael and befriends a sex worker named Primrose. At work, she deals with catty crew members and develops a romantic connection with Scott Eliot, a screenwriter. She attends the Academy Awards, Hollywood’s most glamorous event, but she also dodged danger and violence.
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews, June 1, 2024, review of The Unforgettable Loretta Darling: A Novel.
ONLINE
Katherine Blake website, https://katherineblakeauthor.com/ (July 15, 2024).
Speckled Pen website, https://www.speckledpen.com/ (July 15, 2024), author profile.
Katherine Blake is a pseudonym for Karen Ball, an author who has written over twenty-five children’s books and was a Bookseller Rising Star thanks to her publishing consultancy, Speckled Pen.
She regularly appears on podcasts, including The Bestseller Experiment and SJ Bennett’s PrePublished. She lives in London and runs a biweekly newsletter filled with fun news, book reviews, and regular updates about her miniature schnauzer.
25 Years’ Publishing Experience
It all started when…
My mother taught me to read as a child, and since then I’ve never looked back.
Now, I have the privilege of editing and helping to create some of the bestselling books in the international publishing industry. From popular children’s series to debut adult novelists, I use my industry-leading editorial skills to work with major publishers and talented authors to create the type of books we all love to read and remember.
From idea generation to structural editing, project management to proofreading, I adore the written page – and helping the best lights in publishing burn bright.
IT ALL STARTED WHEN…
My mother taught me to read as a child, and since then I’ve never looked back.
Now, I have the privilege of editing and helping to create some of the bestselling books in the international publishing industry. From popular children’s series to debut adult novelists, I use my industry-leading editorial skills to work with major publishers and talented authors to create the type of books we all love to read and remember.
From idea generation to structural editing, project management to proofreading, I adore the written page – and helping the best lights in publishing burn bright.
My own debut novel, The Unforgettable Loretta, Darling publishes in June 2024 with Viking Books in the UK and Harper Collins in the US.
Blake, Katherine THE UNFORGETTABLE LORETTA DARLING Harper/HarperCollins (Fiction None) $18.99 7, 9 ISBN: 9780063342200
A young English makeup artist, hoarding secrets as well as starry-eyed dreams, takes on midcentury Hollywood.
Margaret, a 20-year-old from England, lands in Los Angeles in 1950 having successfully blackmailed a con artist named Jimmie into getting her there. Renaming herself Loretta as soon as she hits U.S. shores, she heads for Sunset Boulevard, appearing to be a wide-eyed ingenue. But Margaret-now-Loretta is anything but naïve; in fact, she arrives with a particular knowledge gleaned from her mother--a pinch of this vegetation and a petal of that plant, and she has the means to impact another person's health and even end their life. Still, what she really wants to be is a makeup artist. She befriends Primrose, a proverbial gold-hearted prostitute, and soon meets and marries Raphael Goddard, a ridiculously handsome man whose heart proves to be as tarnished as Primrose's is pure. As Loretta apprentices with Alecs PetraÅ, a celebrated makeup artist, she also develops a tantalizing relationship with screenwriter Scott Eliot. So far, so golden Hollywood with a frisson of mystery. There are entertaining scenes focusing on the art and magic of makeup, and Blake clearly enjoys exposing the cattiness of Loretta's colleagues. But the uneven narrative is frustrating at times: The plentiful and lighthearted celebrity sightings and glamour-infused scenes--at one point, Loretta attends the Academy Awards--clash jarringly with an unexpected violent near-rape, and what is meant to be a final big reveal is foreshadowed so frequently that it emerges as a whimper rather than a bang.
Scattered elements of mystery and an entertaining Hollywood success story never quite gel in this unsatisfying debut.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
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"Blake, Katherine: THE UNFORGETTABLE LORETTA DARLING." Kirkus Reviews, 1 June 2024, p. NA. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A795673799/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=5bf779b3. Accessed 25 June 2024.