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Reviews of Repossessing Ernestine

‘An amazing story, full of twists and turns, Dickensian coincidences and discoveries... Repossessing Ernestine moves the reader to anger but should remind most people of what being human and humane is really about’
Eileen Battersby, Irish Times

‘No anger over the wrongs of the past could be as eloquent as this cool truth-telling. Let this book get a grip on you – you won’t regret it’
Jill Paton Walsh, Sunday Express

‘I was moved to tears’
Val Hennessy, Daily Mail

A great rollercoaster rags-to-riches-to-rags tale of Hollywood’s first black sex goddess.

· Like Elvis, like Marilyn, the first black film superstar didn’t die tragically, but lives among us still, changed out of all recognition...
· This is the story of the tragic rise and redemptive fall of Hollywood’s first black sex symbol
· Propelled out of Depression-era poverty by the ambition of her mother and her own talents, young Irene O’Brien finds she attracts attention easily – both welcome (she is talent-spotted from Mississippi to Harlem to Hollywood) and unwelcome (at six, a fat, over-friendly storekeeper gets altogether too excited when she sits on his lap...)
· She blazes a trail no other black performer has taken before and becomes an international sex symbol in the 1950s – ‘the black Monroe’
· Fame and fortune come running: she is the first black woman to be nominated for an Oscar for Best Actress
· But happiness eludes her: her celebrity marriage never works; her daughter is autistic; and the studios soon tire of her as she ages
· Her descent into drunkenness and derangement ends with her very mysterious ‘death’ in the mid-1960s at the age of forty-three. But, beaten but not bowed, Venus Johnson rises from the ashes of Irene O’Brien to tell her tale and live out her days in tranquillity...