Megan Easley-Walsh

Painted Faces Megan Easley-Walsh

Lights! Camera! Hollywood! In 1938, nineteen-year-old Vivian Harris's mother wants her to get married and have a family, but Vivian's seduced by someone else entirely: Hollywood. Yearning to trade in farm dust for stardust, she sets out to seek her future. On the other side of the world, twenty-year-old Eszter Strigosi, a chemistry student, and her brother Márkus, a repairman from Budapest, struggle to escape the growing anti-Semitic tensions that they become the target of. Mystery lurks from the canvas flaps of circus tents, the shadowy streets of Budapest and the lure of the silver screen as Vivian runs to her future and Eszter and Márkus fight to escape the past. When Hollywood beckons, will its dazzling lights be bright enough to outshine the darkness of reality around them?