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  • Beauty Mark: A Verse Novel of Marilyn Monroe by Carole Boston Weatherford
  • Elizabeth Bush
Weatherford, Carole Boston Beauty Mark: A Verse Novel of Marilyn Monroe. Candlewick,
2020 [192p]
Trade ed. ISBN 9781536206296 $19.99
E-book ed. ISBN 9781536214512 $19.99
Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-12

It's the evening of the birthday gala for President John Kennedy, and as superstar [End Page 56] Marilyn Monroe is sewn into her skin-tight evening attire in preparation for her breathy, eyebrow-raising rendition of "Happy Birthday," she recalls a lifetime of events that led to a moment that—like the rest of her rise to fame—would be callously misinterpreted by the press and public for decades to come. The nowlegendary story of Norma Jeane Mortenson's transformation from a child craving parental love and stability into a typecast dumb blonde sex goddess spins out in in fictionalized first-person verse. As readers speed through the compact biographical musings, they are periodically confronted with passages of arresting sensitivity and insight—"Mama was the moon,/waxing and waning between dark moods"; "But I wanted more than sizzle; I wanted steak"—and verses shaped into a variety of poetic forms; nearly transparent photographs, to be in two color in the bound book, background the poems and provide atmosphere. Weatherford judiciously sidesteps gossip surrounding Monroe's relationships with the Kennedy brothers, allowing her narrator to simply refuse to dish out the salacious tidbits she realizes everyone begs for. In a moving coda, Monroe considers what she has come to mean to her critics, documenters, family, and spectators: "Everyone knows Marilyn Monroe./But precious few know Norma Jeane./I'm not even sure I remember her anymore./I am a woman in search of myself." Reference resources, inventively cast as "A Found Poem of Headlines and Quotes," are appended.

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