Young Esme Wells spends her days where no child should. She wanders the Hollywood Park racetrack trailing her gambling-obsessed father and the MGM soundstages following her too-beautiful chorus-girl mother. Both parents are bit players in the big, jostling worlds of mobsters and movie moguls of late 1930s Los Angeles. Illiterate, unkempt, intelligent, and willful, Esme is as ambitious as her parents, and these three opportunists struggle to force the world to open up its fortunes to them. When her father moves to Las Vegas just after the war--to help Bugsy Siegel open his famous Flamingo Hotel--Esme accompanies him, chronicling the fall and then further fall of her complicated parents, as well as her own painful reckoning with love and the American dream.
