What You Don't Know About Charlie Outlaw

January 29, 2018
Stewart’s thoughtful novel (following The Myth of You and Me) chronicles the inner workings of famous television actor Charlie Outlaw after he is kidnapped on a remote island. Honest and people-pleasing to a fault, Charlie alienates his fans and makes his girlfriend, Josie Lamar, feel like a fool after revealing too much about their relationship and his thoughts about the industry in a magazine interview. Josie herself was famous 20 years ago when she starred on a cult superhero show, but now counts herself lucky to score an audition. She breaks up with Charlie, who decides to lick his wounds by going on a hiking trip alone on a remote, unnamed island. Charlie is abducted on his vacation by amateur criminals who hope to ransom their American captive. When he realizes that they don’t recognize him, he gives them a false name and uses what he’s learned as an actor to make the best of his situation. Back home, Josie lands minor roles, readies herself for a convention celebrating the anniversary of her old show, and longs for Charlie as gossip about her leaks to the paparazzi. Stewart skillfully creates multifaceted characters, and she shows a very human side of what’s often thought of as a vapid profession. In particular, readers who have had any sort of celebrity crushes will find this endearing and satisfying.

March 1, 2018
A newly famous actor is kidnapped and his fading-actress girlfriend re-evaluates their connection in Stewart's latest novel (The New Neighbor, 2015, etc.).Charlie Outlaw, ascendant TV star--and yes, that's his real name--has made a fatal romantic gaffe: Asked by reporters if his longtime girlfriend, Josie Lamar, is the love of his life, he gives, from what is perhaps an excess of zeal, the precisely wrong answer: "Yes!...So far." The relationship blows up, and Charlie retreats to an unnamed tropical island far from the artifice of Hollywood. Almost immediately, he is kidnapped by activists protesting overdevelopment--and, surprisingly, not because they know who he is. Meanwhile, a shellshocked Josie, having passed age 40, that dangerous precipice for actresses, phones it in, doing guest spots, a sitcom, and a fan convention. As her career continues its downward spiral from her long-past glory days as TV action heroine Bronwyn Kyle, her increasingly frantic texts to Charlie go unreturned. She has no idea where he is but assumes he's ghosting her. Such is the setup of Stewart's thoughtful study of two Hollywood denizens who take their craft as actors seriously; so seriously that exhortations from Stanislavsky (among other acting gurus) not only precede each section, but inform how Charlie and Josie live their lives, even in extremis--while confined to a car trunk, Charlie contemplates the contrast between acted emotional response and real panic. The chapters alternate between Charlie's and Josie's stories, but the narrative voice which swoops into and around the psyches of all the characters, however minor, is old-school omniscient, saying things like "Let's leave him there, poor Charlie...." Stewart varies the lengths of her sentences to achieve an unstudied lyricism and cadence. As the kidnappers betray their incompetence, which renders them no less dangerous, and Josie considers a flirtation with her former co-star Max, the meditations on acting, while fascinating in their own right, distract more and more from the motivation and behavior of Josie and Charlie as protagonists of this book, not of their latest scripts.An earnest and mostly successful attempt to humanize Hollywood.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

February 15, 2018
Public figures caught in a public break-up, actors Charlie Outlaw and Josie LaMar deal with its aftermath in very different ways. Charlie goes dark by traveling to a remote tropical island to recuperate and reevaluate his romantic and professional situations. Unaware that Charlie is off the grid, Josie tries to focus on reinvigorating her career, which has been on the wane since the heady days of her starring role as the heroic Bronwyn Kyle in an sf TV cult classic. Josie also doesn't know that Charlie has been kidnapped by a rag-tag group of ecoterrorists, and what Charlie doesn't know is that Josie is pregnant with his child. Held hostage in both literal and figurative senses, both parties rely on their theatrical training to cope with their changed circumstances, drawing on sense memory and other acting exercises to find cues to how to act and react in real life. Within the very specific realm of the acting profession, Stewart (The New Neighbor, 2015) masterfully portrays universal truths about self-awareness, image, and responsibility.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)