In The Awful Truth, Cary Grant and Irene Dunne play a divorcing couple determined to frustrate each other’s attempts to find new love. In The Crowd, young John Sims sets out for New York City, determined to become one of those stars of the big city. In Love Affair, a French painter and an American singer, both already engaged, fall in love against all odds.
All romances of some sort, these stories of classical Hollywood cinema have survived the passage of time and stayed relevant even next to the era of special effects and 3D glasses. They are indeed relevant to movie reviewer Farran Smith Nehme, and are, next to an extensive list of other classics, very present in her debut novel MISSING REELS.
Evoking the witty comedy of The Awful Truth, the vastness of New York City in The Crowd, and love’s impossibility in Love Affair, MISSING REELS is an adventure set in the world of 1980's New York. It follows Ceinwen Reilly, a young, film-obsessed, vintage-clothes-wearing Mississippian who discovers her downstairs neighbor might have starred in a long lost silent film. With the help of Matthew Hill, an English mathematician at NYU—who is equal parts logical, charming, and impossible—Ceinwen begins a long quest to recover the forgotten film.
MISSING REELS is, in its own way, an anthology of love affairs: Ceinwen’s with silent films, silent films’s with its New York underworld fan base, New York’s with Ceinwen, and of course, Ceinwen and Matthew's love affair. It will thrill you, enchant you, and install in you a longing for a movie era you didn’t know you could long for.
Refreshing in its energetic unraveling, MISSING REELS is gold for silver screen fans.
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