my first review for my first novel

Peter Swanson's Hollywood Sinners is a loopy "Wizard of Oz" where assorted down-at-heel characters, all of them of questionable virtue, cross paths in 1930's Hollywood -- specifically and tellingly, in 1939 when "The Wizard of Oz" was filmed. Farm girl Karin Panotchitch is journeying to Oz -- or rather, Hollywood -- to become a big star, but instead of munchkins to lead her down the yellow brick road, she meets sinners with delusions of grandeur who make up Hollywood's underbelly. Swanson's writing is off-the-wall and irreverent, speckled with period slang, and characters with names like "Mama Gravy," reminiscent of Ronald Firbank ("The Flower Beneath the Foot") whose work, although dubbed a "specialized taste" (and often published at his own expense), has gained recognition and its own cult following. The first in a Tinseltown trilogy, Hollywood Sinners shows a deranged sense of humor and love of Old Hollywood, portraying a city with more sinners than saints, by far. But the "angels" are there, too, in the form of nuns who are shaping eyebrows as much as saving souls. - d. nowak