A Map to Paradise

In Meissner’s well-rounded if perfunctory latest (after Only the Beautiful), three women caught up in America’s Red Scare form a bond in Malibu, Calif. It’s 1956 and Melanie Cole has just had her breakout role in a film alongside heartthrob Carson Edwards. But after Edwards is added to Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s blacklist as a suspected communist, Melanie is shunned by association. She retreats to a secluded house in Malibu, where her only company is housekeeper Eva Kruse, a Volga German who avoided repatriation to Russia after WWII by claiming to be a displaced person from Poland. Now, Eva worries that scrutiny on Melanie will get her deported. When Melanie attempts to call on her screenwriter neighbor, Elwood Blankenship, for advice about the blacklist, his sister-in-law June refuses to let her in. Eva soon forms a friendship with June and reveals her true heritage, leading June to confide that she’s the one writing Elwood’s screenplays. Eventually, their lives entwine with Melanie’s as the trio realize they’re each other’s only hope of reaching fulfillment. Meissner fully develops her characters and their baggage, and she credibly evokes the Red Scare’s impact on the film industry, but the book’s saccharine message about the value of finding where one belongs feels a bit pat. Still, it’s an accomplished story of Hollywood’s golden age. Agent: Elisabeth Weed, Book Group. (Mar.)