The Audrey Hepburn Estate Review

After years away, Emma is returning to her home, Rolling Hills aka the Aubrey Hepburn Estate due to local legend that Sabrina was filmed on the premise. Untrue. Also untrue is that Emma lived in the main house, she lived above the garage since her mother was the maid. It’s all in the technacalities and though others repeatedly tell Emma that Rolling Hills wasn’t really her home. Her family didn’t own it. It was part of her, lots of first occurred there, her father’s memory is there and her history with two beloved men began there.

One of those men, Leo, the son of the chauffuer is now successful and is tearing Rolling Hills down despite Emma’s protests. The other is Henry, the son of the original owners who had a clandestine relationship with her yet cruelly bowed to pressure and took the most popular girl to prom instead, and the destruction of Rolling Hills brings them together once more to air out grievences and find out lost family secrets.

Yeah, this book surprised me mainly because I thought it would be thoughtful finding oneself alongside Hollywood glamour. Which there was Emma finding herself but it has also the secret mystery of Nazi connections! What a twist!

I knew about Aubrey’s experiences of nearly starving during WW2, but I had no idea about her parents’ ties to facism and the Nazis nor Aubrey being part of the Dutch Resistance. So that was fascinating stuff alongside Janowitz’ elegance in weaving parts of Aubrey’s history into Emma’s story (abandonment from a deceased father, struggle to reconcile her history and the victims of WW2) with allusions to Hepburn’s famous films throughout. It just made me want to watch her movies again especially as the romance plot was largely inspired by Sabrina which was Emma’s favorite movie in the novel.

And the story is so much more than the love triangle although it takes up a bulk of the flashbacks, it grows alongside the character development and mysteries taking place inside Rolling Hills. It sets the scene for the jealousy between Henry and Leo which Emma can’t navigate because she’s hung up in her childhood imaginings of her and Henry, prince and princess, and finally being more than the maid’s daughter. Yet she and Leo have plenty of easy chemistry throughout their adolescence as they try to uncover whether Henry’s father is really a Nazi thanks to the memorabilia they found in a hidden kitchen chamber.

Here, we see two flawed choices. Henry’s flawed in the past and Leo is flawed in the present and Emma is mixed up in this as she can’t set her boundaries because she’s so mixed up even as she doesn’t realize it. Honestly, I thought Janowitz was going to end with Emma single even though the choice was obvious from the beginning. But it just shows how Emma’s personal growth was a priority and her need to work on herself before commitment.

Which brings to what does home and family represent. It’s something Emma had been chasing most of her life since her father’s death and her mother’s distant relationship. Emma put all that meaning into Rolling Hills but she soon finds that it really comes from the people you surround yourself with and the life you’ve created which compared to the nostalgia of the past, the present wins out every time.

It was a good journey though I felt it was a bit rushed in the end as Emma comes to accept her past through a time-skip so we don’t see how she has become so assured when a few chapters ago she was dithering whether she was a good person or not. I also some questions about the timeline as it is implied that this is the present day but all their parents were teenagers during WW2 so I’d feel they’d be a lot older than they were in the story. But then I’m not very good with math so I could be wrong.

This was a wonderful book with mystery, history, romance and old Hollywood charm as Janowitz put so much care and research into this. 5 stars.