A Review of From Dust to Stardust by Kathleen Rooney

Chicago author Kathleen Rooney’s fifth novel, From Dust to Stardust, is set in Hollywood’s silent film era. It’s the enchanting story of Doreen O’Dare, a character loosely based on the real silent film star Colleen Moore. I recognized Moore in the first few pages of the novel because of her contribution to one of Chicago’s landmarks: within the sprawling Museum of Science and Industry is a Fairy Castle containing 150,000 miniatures, built and donated by Moore. 

The Castle’s exquisite rooms serve as a framework for telling Doreen’s story. She is a fourteen-year-old Irish girl from Chicago who breaks into Hollywood by capitalizing on a favor owed to her uncle, and she gains success through her hard work, talent, and the support of her Granny. Her star rises quickly after marrying her agent-husband, Jack. But Jack causes more problems than he solves, and Doreen is not safe in her marriage. 

Since childhood, Doreen and her Granny kept up a private communication with fairies, a charming fantasy that underpinned their close relationship and helped them through life’s trials. The fairies remain a friend to the adult Doreen, and an escape from the perils of her marriage. She builds a magnificent house for them and takes it on tour to raise support for needy children.

In the novel Doreen gives a journalist a detailed tour of the Fairy Castle, and as she does, she educates the reader about the history of filmmaking through sharing the events of her career. Doreen’s life is filled with famous characters, many of them real people from the early days of Hollywood. I asked Kathleen Rooney what goes into the decision to use a historical character in the novel versus an invented one. She replied by email:

I don’t always [include real people] when I write historical fiction, but I like to do so when I can. In this case, because the real life people were not just average Joes but stratospherically well-known celebrities, I figured it made sense to stud my star-studded Hollywood setting with actual stars. Part of what I find illuminating about writing about history is how possible it is for a person to be colossally well-known in their era, and almost totally forgotten not even a century later. The fickleness of fame and the shortness of memory cannot be overstated.

Perhaps one reason many of the stars of early Hollywood have been forgotten is because their films have not survived. I asked Rooney about this:

The era of silent films ran from about 1894 to 1930. Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation estimates that over 90% of American films made before 1929 are lost, and the Library of Congress estimates that 75% of all silent films are lost forever. So part of the reason that we are not watching silent pictures is because a lot of them simply are not available… Working on this novel made me view the era with a sense of incomparable loss and a desire to call people’s attention to the art works of that era that we still have access to. If people are looking for one silent film to see to understand how mesmerizing the art form was, they should see The Passion of Joan of Arc by Carl Theodore Dreyer.  If you can spare time for two, see Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans by F.W. Murnau. And if you can go for three, see The Wind starring the astonishing Lillian Gish.

Lillian Gish appears in From Dust to Stardust, and is a favorite of the author’s:

Lillian Gish was famously talented, deeply dedicated to her craft, and downright sphinx-like about her inner and personal lives. Her sister, Dorothy, also an actor famously said once, when asked “I have no idea what my sister is actually like” which I thought was so compelling, I put it in the book. To commit oneself so completely to one’s work and to be so good at emoting while in character but so inscrutable to your loved ones is fascinating to me.

I asked Rooney what surprised her in her research, did she find anything unexpected in the prodigious amount of research that went into this novel?

I’m surprised by how many lost films get miraculously found in unexpected places. A brilliant contemporary film that addresses this is Dawson City: Frozen Time by Bill Morrison, a moving documentary about the 1978 discovery of 533 nitrate reels buried beneath a forgotten hockey rink in 1929 in the Klondike Gold Rush town of the title.

In the novel, Doreen O’Dare’s film career is short, but her life is long. She begins and ends in Chicago, and as someone who has lived in and around Chicago for 25 years, I smiled at Doreen’s dislike of New York City and her love of my city. I wondered if that was something Rooney invented for the novel or found in her research.

Ha. I’m glad you liked that! I love both Chicago and New York, and I have no reason to believe the real Colleen Moore disliked the Big Apple, but I thought it would be funny if Doreen did. Something about the pioneers of the early film era feels very much like a rush to the Pacific and a turning of a bunch of backs on the East coast for a fresher start. And since Doreen is a fan of both Chicago and LA, I figured why not give her a dislike of Gotham?

I liked Doreen O’Dare very much; I was rooting for her because I recognized her struggle to free herself from heavy things that attached themselves to her when she was too young to realize what they were. At first, her fizzy life as a movie star might seem trivial, as her attachment to fairies seems childish, but her story shows that the grit it takes to remain capable of belief in beauty and goodness is neither trivial nor childish. 

I remember my first impression of the real-life Fairy Castle – I was surprised at its size and amazed that the precious materials used in it are real. At first sight I thought the gold and jewels must be fake. Tension between reality and imagination shows up a lot in this novel, and people seem to want the magic but they also want to know what is “real.” I asked Kathleen Rooney how she thinks an attraction to magic helps people deal with life.

One of my goals with the book is to remind people who are from Chicago that [the Fairy Castle] exists and to bring back their recollections of it, and also to get people who have never seen it to pay a visit. It’s one of the most wonderful human-made objects I’ve ever laid eyes on. A theme of the book is how to stay enchanted in a disenchanting world, a world that too often wants to show us something ugly, paltry, vulgar, and cruel and declare that we have to accept it because that’s just what it’s like in the quote-unquote real world. But it’s not. A better world is possible. Artists–including actors, writers, sculptors, and craftspeople–show us every day that we can refuse ugliness in favor of beauty, and we can reject fear and suspicion in favor of collective wonder. I hope that From Dust to Stardust is a magical book in the sense that we can make magic together every day if we choose to do so, just by showing up and being present and willing to do so.