I just could not get into this book. It seems hard to follow and the author uses obscure words in the writing.

The central character of this book is Maria, an Italian immigrant living in Los Angeles and working for Mercury Pictures. While Maria deals with her guilt over exposing her father’s politics in Italy just before WWII causing his imprisonment, she manages to work her way up in the movie industry eventually becoming a producer which was unheard of for a woman during this time period. Several side stories within the book introduce the reader to the struggles and successes of other immigrants working in the industry and we also learn about the prejudices and restrictions imposed on them during wartime. We also learn more about Maria’s father, Giuseppe who is “imprisoned” in San Lorenzo, Italy as a political prisoner and confined to staying within the town limits as the German army rules the area.
I was intrigued by the concept of a WWII story with a focus on what was going on in Hollywood and American immigrants at that time. I see from reading other reviews that other readers thoroughly enjoyed the book. Unfortunately, the various stories mostly fell flat for me. I found the movie industry angle mostly boring and the characters very unlikable, including Maria even though I did admire her ambition. The best part of the book was Giuseppe’s story in Italy and I wished there was more focus on him. But I’m certain that this book will appeal to some readers especially lovers of WWII fiction.
Thanks to NetGalley and Random House Publishers for the Advanced Reader Copy.

Mara’s new novel, Mercury Pictures Presents, did not do it for me.

The story is primarily set in 1940s Hollywood with flashback narratives dedicated to the main character, Maria, and her childhood set in Italy. The novel tackles poignant topics such as emigres, war propaganda, identity, and assimilation. While the novel adds a fresh perspective on World War II narratives, the writing makes the story a slog to get through. The prose is lyrical, and at times beautiful, but mostly it’s so superfluous that sentences loose meaning. Everything is a metaphor with a roundabout way of saying something, and with no direct story telling it was grueling to finish. Additionally, I know Mara likes a sweeping novel, but the plethora of characters were not seamlessly integrated into this story. One character slowly reached a dead end in his narrative and just rode off into the sunset (see now he’s got me using metaphors). He also embedded “wrap ups” for characters when their story ended. It’s like when you watch a movie based on real events and you get the “where they are now” paragraphs at the end - that’s what this book did, repeatedly, mid narrative.

Overall, I am frustrated by this book. The premise is incredibly promising and the snippets in Italy kept me reading. I was not invested in any of the Hollywood characters and wish I could have read an entire novel about San Lorenzo.

3.5 stars, rounded up. Anthony Marra takes us on a charming, intermittently affecting jaunt through early-1940s Hollywood, with frequent narrative digressions following one character or another elsewhere in the world, mainly pre-war and wartime Italy. Marra remains an impressive writer. His character descriptions are excellent, full of humorous and inventive turns of phrase, and the general prose often sparkles. For a book whose subject matter often strays into the disheartening and fatalistic (hey, it's an immigrant story in WWII-era America: that'll happen), it's a surprisingly funny book all things considered. But, just when you're starting to have fun, Marra punctures the jovial atmosphere with moments of searing pathos -- another great skill of his, but it does create some mood whiplash. At least some of those moments of pathos are heartwarming and not only heartwrenching.

I've been reading this novel off and on for about a month, and just can't get sufficiently engaged to keep going. I've read and enjoyed ten other books while going back and forth with this one, so it's not a reading slump, but perhaps just not a book for me. The story meanders through time and different locations, and each time I begin to get interested in a character or a plot thread, it moves on to something completely different. I absolutely LOVED Marra's earlier novel, A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, so was very eager to read this new one. It's not terrible, just not a book that compels me to return to it. I won't be posting this review online, as I don't want to discourage other readers who may enjoy this book more than I did, but it's time for me to move on

Mercury Pictures Presents is a story that revolves around Maria Lagana, an Italian immigrant to Los Angeles, and a movie production company trying to escape censorship during the late 1930’s-1940’s. The movie company is a refuge for many European immigrants trying to escape discrimination and the effects of World War 2 in Europe. Maria becomes an executive assistant/ producer for Art Feldman who owns Mercury Pictures with his brother, Ned.
The backstories of Maria and several other characters are interesting and interconnected through Maria. Her father remained a political prisoner in Italy. She continues to write him frequent letters.
As the war goes on, the movie company survives on producing propaganda films and hiring many immigrant actors. I enjoyed Anna’s story as a miniaturist and her escape from Germany. I also enjoyed Nico’s story.
Overall, I enjoyed the book, although at times it was slower
. It was an interesting perspective of the 1930’s- 1940’s from the Hollywood perspective and the difficulties of those who immigrated to the US during pre World War 2 and throughout the war.
Thank you for this free ARC from the publisher through NetGalley.

I enjoyed this book. I have always been intrigued by the world of Hollywood and it was interesting to get a glimpse of what it was like in the olden days.

This was my first book by Marra and I loved his style. The story is sweeping and the language is beautiful, often funny. The complex lives of the characters created an engrossing read that kept me turning pages. One of the stories set in Italy dragged and I had trouble keeping track of the characters in that section. But the other angles of the story were interesting and I really enjoyed this fresh angle on the WWII-era.

As grand as the movies the fictional studio produces, Anthony Marr’s latest book, ‘Mercury Pictures Presents’ is a sweeping story that centers in Hollywood while shifting from Italy to Germany, from the deep south to the far west. It has all the built in scaffolding for a towering mini series on a premium cabler, or a terrific movie after some serious cuts. The main character in this sweeping time capsule of a story is Maria Lagana, a young Italian woman from Rome who immigrates to the US and ends up working for the head of Mercury Pictures, a small upcoming studio that hopes to compete someday with the big boys. In her personal life, Maria secretly dates an Asian actor who struggles to be seen as a leading man, fighting against the stereotyping that would relegate him to either villains or disposable sidekicks to the main star. Marr also takes us back through her childhood, with a life changing incident that led to she and her mother leaving their homeland and her father behind. With so much going on you could imagine a large cast of characters and you’d be spot on. They drift in and out of the endlessly flowing tapestry which at times feels excessive, for example when a young Black soldier is introduced nearly three quarters of the way through the narrative and then his story is gone fifty pages later.
As well as incorporating World War II and Pearl Harbor, Marr attempts to cover the multiple ways the US has failed in its promise of All Men Are Created Equal, a promise that still has woefully fallen short to this day. Drawing so many direct parallels with our current country what struck me so much while reading this was how little we’ve learned as a nation, and how we are forced to relive history when we don’t heed its lessons. From fascism, to propaganda, nativism and acts of shocking racism, we’ve been here before and clearly are meant to be here again. Ultimately this book was a mixed bag for me. I loved a lot of it, and think at it’s core there’s an interesting story here despite the incredibly verbose writing that forced me to get very familiar with the dictionary on the kindle.
I also felt the story could have had the same amount of resonance with less. I wanted to have an emotional connection to these characters and kept waiting for that payoff that should have been there but never quite hit it for me. I think in large part this was because by books end it wasn’t about just one woman anymore, but so many other people whose journeys had to be wrapped up as well, creating some overall fatigue. I liked enough. Just not a home run. Thank you to @hogarth and @netgalley for the advance copy. #MercuryPicturesPresents will be released on August 2.

I don't have enough words to describe how I feel about this book. I LOVED it! This is a book that I will reread many times. It is beautiful! I can't stop telling everyone they must purchase it and read it as soon as it comes out. My favorite book that I've read so far this year!!

I enjoyed the characters and clever writing style but found myself getting lost in the many storylines at times. It took me a while to get through so that didn’t help ‘keeping up’. Very interesting underlying plot. A 3.5 star book but couldn’t round up in the end.

A World War II novel that didn't feel like a WWII novel. There are a LOT of characters and stories in this book, and I really liked the way Marra sort of zooms in on one and then zooms back into their past and tells the reader how they ended up here.

I was pretty sure I knew how Marra would tie up the central story line, and I was right, but the scene still made me feel something. Sharp and lovely writing throughout. A thoroughly enjoyable read.

Thanks to NetGalley for the advance copy.

As hard as I tried I couldn't connect with this book. Interesting themes: Hollywood in the 40s and Italy during Hitler's take over. However, the characters are too cardboard and therefore not interesting. May give it another try later on but there is too much else to read.

I really wanted to love this book. Marra writes with great style and wit, but, unfortunately, the story moved too slowly for my taste and I kept putting the book aside in favor of others.

I struggled to get into this story, even though I am and will continue to be a fan of Anthony Marra. Thank you for the opportunity.

Anthony Marra’s latest book is a must-read, and maybe more than once. Mercury Pictures is a failing Hollywood studio that is trying to make it to the next level. It is up against a lot of problems: finance, the advent of bigger studios, censorship, materials, the looming WW2, the Hollywood “game,” racism, sexism and of course the personalities trying to make a go of it. Each character has a story to tell that Marra weaves into a wonderful tapestry of the late 1930s and 1940s with some hints as to the future. The prose set my highlighter on fire with delight. Geographically the book takes the reader to California, Germany, Italy and Utah…..and something is learned at every stop. When a character is introduced, I wanted to stay with that storyline, but then I was whisked away by another character to a different location and time….and I loved that, too. This was a great reading experience reflecting the past and challenging what we have learned from it. Seriously great insight, humor and drama. Loved every minute of it. Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing this title.

Mercury Pictures is (at best) a B-movie studio, making low-budget pictures and barely breaking even. Studio head Artie Feldman releases a film loosely based on the Faust legend that is reviewed as a load of manure, until the attack on Pearl Harbor six months later. Following Pearl Harbor, the movie is seen as profound and prophetic, a must-see for all Americans. Art mirrors life and history in this portrait of studio politics, paranoia, revenge, inequality, the meaning of family, and life on the American wartime home front. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an eARC.

I’m a serious fan of Anthony Marra (his remarkable, greatly moving novel A Constellation of Vital Phenomena is one of my half-dozen all-time favourites), so I was very keen to get my hands on this. (Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for an ARC.) There must something that appeals to Marra’s psyche in creating worlds swept up in war and having his large cast of characters reacting to the stresses. His last novel was set in Bosnia during the early 90s, obviously a dangerous and dreadful place to be. This time we have a sweeping epic moving between the fascist-ridden Italy of the 1920s and 1930s and Hollywood before and during the Second World War. Maria Lagana as a little girl and her mother leave Italy in the 1920s to live with relatives in Hollywood because Maria accidentally exposed the secret writings of her father, a famed defence attorney before the fascists cracked down and made any dissent indefensible. He was arrested and sent to an impoverished southern village for an indefinite period of internal exile (confinato). It’s Maria’s story we’re largely concerned with here; the years pass, and she ends up as a producer (as a woman, forever underpaid and uncredited) at Mercury Pictures, a second-tier studio of formulaic B pictures run by founder Artie Feldman, in a constant battle for control with his twin brother. The setting allows for an exploration of multiple strands and themes. Maria’s lover is a Chinese-American actor, but they have to hide their affair because of the miscegenation laws. Because Chinese characters in Hollywood movies are played by white actors with taped eyelids and heavy makeup, he is forced to enact Japanese villains, at great risk to himself when drunken sailors recognize him from the movie they’ve just seen and, forgetting it was just a movie, plan to exact revenge. Maria works at the studio with an ever-growing community of European emigres who fled unfriendly regimes but are now being ostracized or rounded up as enemy aliens. Nino, an Italian itinerant photographer, shows up to fill her in on some of what happened to her father, who rescued and educated him as a kid and enabled him to escape Italy with a false identity. And so on.

Marra’s supple prose (there ate some beautiful sentences and turns of phrase here) is in service of a great story, with a colourful cast of characters well-drawn, flaws intact. There are some fascinating vignette, including one in which a German artisan working at the studio is grabbed up by the American government, in spite of her enemy alien status, to assist in a full-scale recreation of Berlin in the desert to help calibrate the incendiary bombs for a more successful fire-bombing than they’ve been able to achieve this far. (Apparently, this actually took place.) I really enjoyed this book and heartily recommend it, though it fell a bit short of his truly sublime previous novel (it almost had to, really.)

I read and liked Marra's powerful A Constellation of Vital Phenomena. Thus, I was quite pleased to receive an advance copy of this, his latest book. BUT. I found this book numbing, looong, and boring. I was never engaged and could have walked away at any time, I persevered--without payoff. It could have/should have been more--I was sorely disappointed.

The setting:
Maria Lagana, leaves Mussolini's Italy to reinvent herself and survive. She moves to Los Angeles with her mother "...after a childhood transgression leads to her father's arrest. Fifteen years later, on the eve of America's entry into World War II, Maria is an associate producer at Mercury Pictures, trying to keep her personal and professional lives from falling apart ... Mercury Pictures becomes a nexus of European émigrés: modernist poets trying their luck as B-movie screenwriters, once-celebrated architects becoming scale-model miniaturists, and refugee actors finding work playing the very villains they fled. While the world descends into war, Maria rises through a maze of conflicting politics, divided loyalties, and jockeying ambitions. But when the arrival of a stranger from her father's past threatens Maria's carefully constructed facade, she must finally confront her father's fate--and her own."

Melodramatic? Perhaps. But there's McCarthyism, fascism, racism, sexism, anti-foreigners [many emigres/refugees] populating 1940s Hollywood--all real. The many, many descriptions where Hollywood sets were built to mimic/stand in for battles/propaganda were interesting [as were some of the other Hollywood details], but...

And, though many of the characters were well drawn {Maria, Artie, Ned, Vincent, Eddie [to name a few!], I wasn't invested in any of them.

I enjoyed the multiple flashes of humor and often wonderful descriptions:

"watching a pigeon autograph the windshield of her boss's new convertible"
"compact opulence of her build"
"Despite their love of cigarettes, physical inertia, and bootlegged grappa of questionalbe potabily, the great-aunts exuded immortality."
"coniferous chill transmitted across thousands of miles"

but the prose was not enough to sustain me.

In the distinct minority of readers. This book did nothing for me. And ultimately, the ending too pat.

We follow a plethora of cahracters from different countries during WWII and how they have to make new lives in the US. We follow specially Maria after something terrible happens to her father and she escapes to the US with her mom and ends up working at a movie production company.

This book really shines in its characters and their development. It's such a pleasure to follow all of them and to go along while they are trying to make new lives for themselves, trying to be happy and to have a little piece in their lives. The characters feel so alive and they are all so compelling and real; all of them have qualities and shortcomings and dreams they want to fulfill. Even a side character is really developed and layered and I wanted to know everything that happened and was going to happen to them. My favorite is Maria, but all of them shone through. There isn't a lot of unexpected twists and turns in the story but following along with these characters and their thoughts was enough for me. I liked how we follow the story manly through immigrant eyes, not only the plot points surrounding WWII but also life as an immigrant in the US especially from specific nations.

I really liked the narrator voice; there was a wit to the narration that really resonated with me, making the story "fun" (as fun as it can be in a WWII novel).

Thank you Netgalley, author, and publisher for the ARC.