After a scandalous affair, a love child is placed with an eccentric, well-connected Hollywood family, his origins meticulously concealed by a notorious lawyer.
Determined to protect the secret, his adoptive mother enlists powerful allies—including a television icon—to ensure he never uncovers the truth. But as the boy matures, he begins to sense something is amiss. Driven by a longing for love and belonging, he embarks on a courageous quest to uncover his past, ultimately revealing a story that powerful figures fought to keep buried forever.
With vivid storytelling and raw honesty, this book explores identity, belonging, and the resilience it takes to confront hidden truths and find redemption.
Assessment:
Plot: Moscatel crafts a deeply engaging story that will undoubtedly resonate with readers. The author unravels the narrative and family secrets uncovered in a well-paced and entertaining manner.
Prose: Well-written with wit and honesty interspersed throughout, Moscatel comes to terms with his upbringing, his own identity, and his family's past. Through careful diction, his thoughts transform his feelings about his predicament.
Originality: Moscatel has a truly unique story to tell and does so with refreshing candor and emotional integrity.
Character/Execution: Readers who may be seeking their own answers about tangled family history will find much to appreciate in this narrative. As a character in his own story, Moscatel's emotional and psychological journey is significant and authentically portrayed.
Date Submitted: December 20, 2022
In THE BASTARD OF BEVERLY HILLS, Rafael Moscatel tells an amazing story about fighting his demons and dealing with lies, loss and rejection, while growing up in Los Angeles, the City of Angels. His journey evokes a rollercoaster of emotions, from admiration to laughter, to a deep feeling of empathy and comradery. His story is compelling, entertaining and inspiring, a beacon of hope for those lost in the darkness of the human condition.
Moscatel recalls living among the famous—and living with a secret—in this memoir.
The author, a film director, presents a brief but engaging and surprise-filled memoir of a man whose true identity was kept from him well into adulthood. The adopted son of Ray and Eleanor Moscatel, a Sephardic Jewish couple living in Beverly Hills, Moscatel was adopted after the tragic death of his parents’ natural son, Albert. Moscatel details how he had always been aware of the ambiguity of his origins (his parents at one point claimed was as a “test-tube baby”), and that it was only later in life that he found out the truth and began to heal from the psychological damage of his parents’ subterfuge. On a lighter note, Moscatel has plenty to share about living in Beverly Hills among the famous, some of whom were friends and neighbors to the Moscatel family. He recounts his family’s close friendship with actor Michael Landon and his family, as well as various members of the Gilbert family, whose oldest daughter, actress Melissa Gilbert, was an adoptee like him. He includes accounts of encounters, both minor and serious, with celebrities ranging from Frank Sinatra to Tony Roma (the latter was briefly his mother’s husband). The memoir is full of twists and turns—the surprise ending regarding Moscatel’s background also speaks to the stigma surrounding adoption that has only recently begun to abate. The author writes movingly of his parents’ own difficulties, displaying understanding and grace: “The emotional upheaval of a loss blurs a survivor’s memory. And their grief, from denial, to bouts of anger, guilt, bargaining, and ultimately acceptance, often ends with a little piece of them dying, too.” Moscatel does not offer the reader a pat happy ending, but his story reaches a satisfying resolution.
A memoir that starts slowly but reaches a powerful conclusion for the patient reader.
