Pinups and war widows and sexy fun romance - I thought I was going to love this. It was just too long and meandering, though. It started off great, lots of fun with the photo shoots and developing relationships and the slow fall and the great 1940s Chicago feeling, but then...it kept going. And it shouldn't have. Because then there was the FBI and the lawyer and the Pulitzer and the enemy list and the marriages and the fleeing from the city and those things were not fun. How odd. It could have been great. Wink Dutton, an artist sidelined by wartime injury, finds himself in Chicago with very little money and even less in the way of prospects. He reaches out to Sal Chesterton, the wife of his buddy still in the Pacific, and together they try to keep her Chicago camera shop going. The idea Sal comes up with, before Wink even enters the picture is a bawdy one - she's going to give boys a peek at what they're fighting for, and make a few bucks at the same time.The era is beautifully evoked by Amick, and I especially loved the discussions of what makes a photograph eye-catching and thought-provoking. There were several interesting characters who moved the plot forward and the decisions that each character made were believable and understandable. I loved the natural writing about sexual themes and behavior - so many writers discussing this era seem to think that people were found under cabbage leaves. Make no mistake, this is a novel written by an adult for adults, so the frank dialog may bother more sensitive readers.The premise is brilliant and the writing is fast-paced. I only had one minor complaint with the execution. It's painfully clear that a man is writing dialogue for the women present here, and not only does he not have a good grasp on how women actually speak, but he also hasn't done a lot of thinking about how they spoke in the 1940s. There are a lot of cliched "now listen here, buster[s:]" and in those instances, the dialogue sounded like it came out of a B-movie. In an otherwise tightly-written, intelligent novel, that was a disappointment. If it weren't for this, NOTHING BUT A SMILE would have been a five-star read.
Do You like book Nothing But A Smile: A Novel (2009)?
i read it in two days - really enjoyed it! i expected to and was still pleasantly surprised.
—Eve
Loved the characters, found myself wondering if he'd watched the Betty Paige movie.
—Booboo99
Ehh, Just a bit of light entertainment, no inspiration or or earth shaking.
—emma
Started great,then kind of tapered off in the end.
—niko
