Land of Dreams

Ellis Island #3

by Kate Kerrigan

Set in 1940s Los Angeles, the compelling final installment in New York Times bestselling author Ellie Hogan’s sweeping immigrant trilogy begun in Ellis Island and City of Hope—a story of family, love, danger, and ambition in Hollywood during World War II.

Irish immigrant Ellie Hogan has finally achieved the American Dream. But her comfortable bohemian life on Fire Island, New York, is shattered when her eldest adopted son, Leo, runs away, lured by the promise of fortune and fame in Hollywood. Determined to keep her family intact, Ellie follows him west, uprooting her youngest son and long-time friend Bridie.

In Los Angeles, Ellie creates a fashionable new home among the city’s celebrities, artists, and movie moguls. She is also drawn into intense new friendships, including talented film composer Stan, a man far different from any she has ever met, and Suri, a beautiful Japanese woman and kindred spirit, who opens Ellie’s eyes to the injustices of her country.

While Leo is dazzled by Hollywood’s glitz, Ellie quickly sees that the golden glamour masks a world of vanity and greed. Though she tries to navigate them around the dangers of their new home, she will not be able protect them from an even more terrifying threat: war.

Genres: Historical Fiction, Fiction, Historical, Ireland, Book Club, American History, The United States Of America

336 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2013

About the author

Kate Kerrigan is an author living and working in Ireland. Her novels are Recipes for a Perfect Marriage, The Miracle of Grace, Ellis Island, City of Hope, Land of Dreams and The Lost Garden.

Kate began her career as an editor and journalist, editing many of Britain’s most successful young women’s magazines before returning to her native Ireland in the 1990’s to edit Irish Tatler. She writes a weekly column in the Irish Mail about her life in Killala, County Mayo – and contributes regularly to RTE's radio's Sunday Miscellany.

Her novel, The Dress, published by Head of Zeus was shortlisted at the Irish Book Awards in 2015, and her new novel, It Was Only Ever You, was published in hardback edition, October 2016.


www.katekerrigan.ie

I devoured this book in one sitting. I LOVED it!
Marian Keyes

This story is written with so much heart you can hear its beat and feel its pulse in every word on every page.
Cecelia Ahern

Reviews

[Dale Harcombe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I Had really enjoyed this author's previous book and looked forward to following Ellie in this tale. But in the end I'm not even sure why I continued to read it. I found Ellie annoying and selfish in many ways and got fed up with the recounting of the earlier books and story. It felt like overkill. Towards the end I found myself skimming just to be finished with it. The characters and story struck me as very like the Hollywood scene - artificial.

[Emma · Rating 1 out of 5]

I don't understand why the author went overboard with information about the previous two books? If you had them, then you would know all of it already and if you hadn't I don't think it would've affected the story that much. I also did not like how every one of Ellie's beliefs or opinions were stated at lest twice if not three times, especially when a lot of it is implied anyways? Yes I get that she is a feminist or that Maureen(?)woman is bossy, can we please move on now??!! It even felt a bit aggressive! I was intrigued enough to look past these faults for a few chapters but I'm probably not going to continue reading it as it just irks me too much!

[Sally Sutton · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty feeble book- basically Mills and Boon but much longer and tortuous-I cannot bear ‘heroines’ who are supposedly feminist and independent when they spend their time ‘knowing’ that men secretly want to bend them to their will- if you are self sufficient you don’t even notice! This was the third book in a series- I haven’t read the previous two but the author was cognisant of this problem so reiterated the story so far, first time was useful, second fine but subsequent repeats totally unnecessary. However that said I did keep reading so it obviously had something to keep me enthralled even if it was with a modicum of annoyance coupled with a very hot day so lazing with a book was a good option.

[Sarah · Rating 2 out of 5]

I picked up this ARC last week at ALA because of the tagline: "In 1940s Hollywood, not all that glitters is gold..."

After the first few chapters, I realized that it's third in a trilogy. I don't think I missed much though--the author did a great job of telling everything that happened in the previous books. In fact, I think I learned TOO much about the past.

Ellie Hogan is from Ireland, but has made quite the life for herself in New York as an artist. She makes enough money to survive on her own and raise her two sons, both adopted while married to two previous husbands. Now her oldest has run off to Hollywood to become an actor. She chases after him to bring him back home, but ends up helping him try to make his dream of being a star come true.

There's a little romance in this one, but I just didn't fall in love with the writing. I won't be going back to read the previous two novels in the series.

[Kathleen (Kat) Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I had the opportunity to review Land of Dreams by Kate Kerrigan, I really thought this would be a novel I would love. I love novels that take you back to fond times in our history, from WWII, to romance of the glory days of Hollywood in its infancy stages along with struggling to find ways to fit in for immigrants that had come to America searching for a better life. Even the back of the novel offered me a glimpse into something magical that fit the types of novels that I enjoy and find myself coming back to again and again. However this one for me didn't translate over from the premise to the actual story itself. There was a disconnect there I was searching for and never really found.

Being a huge fan of Kate Kerrigan's from Ellis Island, I was hoping for more than what I got by the end of Land of Dreams. Ellie Hogan has been through two marriages in her life time which has resulted in her being a single mother of two boys she didn't give birth to but adopted when their own birth mothers had abandoned them. Neither of the two boys, Leo and Tom were related either. She lives on Fire Island in New York where she makes a living as an Irish impressionist selling her works of art she paints from her time on the island or from her memories in Ireland. Tom, the youngest still lives with her while Leo has been sent to a Catholic boarding school.

She receives a phone call from the school telling her that Leo has simply left school and they fear is headed to California where he went with a schoolmate on vacation and found himself being lured into the magic of being the next rising star by a man he met there. Now Ellie, rushes off to find Leo in hopes of getting him to return home and back to school. When she arrives, she finds 16-year-old Leo in the company of Freddie Dubois, an upcoming agent finding new talent for the movie studios. He believes that Leo will be the next big star to make it to the big screen and has convinced Leo to audition. Ellie is torn between taking Leo back home and realizing that he already lost so much with the death of his father and abandonment of his birth mother, she relents and makes a temporary move to Los Angeles while he tries out. Upon her arrival she has now lost her drive to paint and instead immerses herself in being a full-time mother to Tom, supporting Leo in his career and making her own way in life with the men she meets. She knows she doesn't want to fall in love and get married again, but soon finds the charms of a man named Stan who comes to her aid more than once, a possibility. Soon war is declared and America is now involved with WWII and we see how that plays out for everyone involved including the internment of the Japanese Americans.

I received Land of Dreams by Kate Kerrigan compliments of William Morrow, a division of Harper Collins Publishers for my complimentary copy of this novel. I did not receive any monetary compensation for a favorable review and the opinions included here are strictly mine. I was hoping for more than the novel delivered for me, perhaps dealing with Hollywood a bit more than just a gloss over when Leo was auditioning for the parts, but it was more along the lines of dealing with Ellie as the central character and what that meant as she transitioned to a life she never dreamed of and made the best of for the sake of her children and her friends. There were characters you got introduced to like Freddie, who seemed like filler instead of an actual character we could care about. We see bits of pieces of him through Leo's story but never understood his motivation or why he found himself in places he winds up. Even Leo's story is a bit vague considering Ellie uproots her entire life to chase after him, but he seems like a bit of a ghost in this one. I rate this one a 3.5 out of 5 stars and believe others may have different perspective than what I got. Being a huge fan of old Hollywood and WWII, I was hoping for more than what this one delivered.

[Laurie · Rating 2 out of 5]

It’s 1942 and twice-widowed Ellie Hogan’s teenaged son Leo has run away from boarding school. It doesn’t take much sleuthing to find out that he’s taken the train across country from New York to Los Angeles: to Hollywood. He’s determined that he will be a star. Ellie immediately jumps on a train and follows him, to discover him living with another young man, Freddie, who is trying to become the world’s first actor’s agent, and Freddie’s girlfriend, Crystal, who fancies herself a starlet. They are holed up at the Chateau Marmont, with little money and no jobs. Ellie allows herself to be convinced that Leo has a real chance at getting a part in an upcoming film, so she takes a room for herself and Leo and figures it’ll only be a few days before this nonsense is out of the way and they can head home. To her surprise, Leo gets a part and is put into acting classes at the studio. Stuck in California for the time being, Ellie rents a house and sends for her younger son, Tom, and her aging friend and housekeeper, Bridie, and settles in for a few months while the film is being shot. She ends up taking in Freddie and Crystal, mothering them just like she does her sons, even though this means they have taken over the room she’d designated as her artist’s studio. For Ellie, being a mother is the most important thing in her life- she admits that she married her second husband in large part so she could be a mother to his son Leo. She is willing to put her own life- both professional and personal- on hold for her sons, feeling that she doesn’t have enough time or love to go around. Whether this means quashing a relationship that seems to have a lot of potential or giving up her painting, she’s fine with it.

Ellie acts like a very entitled woman. She barges in everywhere and expects everyone to listen to her, whether it be a studio executive or the military head of a relocation camp where a Japanese friend of hers is interned. She comes by this trait not from being born into money; she worked her way up from nothing during the Depression. She just feels she has to do her best to try and help her friends and family- even when she doesn’t have all the information and they desperately do not want her to intervene.

The book jacket makes the story sound exciting: it mentions glamour and glitz and having to protect her family from the threat of the war. In reality, Ellie encounters the glitz only occasionally, and the war is little threat to her family, although her own actions make things difficult for both her Polish born boyfriend and her Japanese friend. The story really doesn’t have much action in it. Told by Ellie in the year 1950, a lot of it is backstory (this book is the third in a trilogy) and her emotions and thoughts. I found I could not get really interested in the book; I couldn’t make a connection with Ellie or any of the other characters. They were flat and not fleshed out. Bridie as the Irish housekeeper was very nearly a stereotype. I found myself impatient with the book, wanting to get it read and have it over with so I could go on to something more interesting There is also a (small) problem with some anachronistic language – ‘networking’ and ‘lifestyle’ weren’t used in 1950 that I know of- but that may have been fixed in the final edit.

[Diane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Readers first met Ellie Hogan in Kate Kerrigan's novel Ellis Island. We followed Ellie as she married the love of her life John, came to America to make money for an operation John needed, and was emotionally torn as she built a life in New York while missing her husband back home.

The second book in the trilogy, City of Hope, covered Ellie's life back home in Ireland with her husband. It was a difficult adjustment, moving back to a farm in rural Ireland after living in an exciting, vibrant city. After John's death, a grieving Ellie comes back to New York and opens a home for people who lost their homes during the Depression, eventually building an entire community.

The third book in the trilogy, set in 1942, is Land of Dreams, which finds a middle-aged Ellie living on Fire Island working on her art. Ellie is a painter, and she has a bit of a following. She has two sons, Leo, the sixteen-year-old son of her second husband Charles, and seven-year-old Tommy, who was left as a baby by his mother in Ellie's care.

When Leo runs away from his boarding school, Ellie tracks him down in Hollywood, where he hopes to find a career as an actor in the movies. She intends to take him back home, but after finding him, she decides to give him a chance at the screen test his young agent Freddie has set up for him.

Leo gets a small role in a war movie, and Ellie doesn't have the heart to make Leo give up his dream. As an artist, she understands Leo's desire to express himself. She brings Tommy and Bridie, the elderly woman whom she first met when they both worked as household staff years ago in New York, to Hollywood.

The family sets up in Hollywood where they seem to enjoy the sunshine lifestyle. This is a different Ellie than we have seen before. In the first two books, she was working and struggling to build a life for herself and her community. Now Ellie is middle-aged, and responsible for her two sons.

Ellie had miscarriages during her marriage to John, which brought her great sadness. She never thought she would have children, and now her life revolves around her children. Many women who have children will understand Ellie's feelings about her children growing older and needing her less.

This Ellie is more contemplative, more reflective about her life. She doesn't have to work so hard, she has more time to think. She met an older man, a music composer, on the train to Hollywood, and they continued their relationship in Hollywood.

Kerrigan's characters are so multi-dimensional, even the minor ones. Stan, the composer, loves Ellie, but he is not willing to pine for her if she will give him no chance. Freddie, the agent, is not some sleazy Hollywood type, but a young man with a goal and he becomes a part of Ellie's family. Even Freddie's actress-girlfriend, who could be a golddigger, is interesting.

Many times in trilogies, the main character remains stagnant from book to book. In Kate Kerrigan's Ellis Island series, we experience the growth and depth of Ellie from young girl desperately in love with her husband and willing to move to America to save his life, to grieving young widow who channels her grief by building a community for those in need to middle-aged mother who loves her children enough to give them their dreams and in turn find her own.

[Machel · Rating 5 out of 5]

CAN'T wait to read trilogy book three. ELLIS Island started Ellie's journey & this will be so exciting to read!! Kate Kerrigan also writes under (or did in the past) Morag Prunty.
~Well, well, well. Here I am with a red nose, swollen eyes from crying from happiness at the ending. So many great quotes in this book about life, the passage of time and how we lose and love and there is much loss through the chapters of this life. We cannot own anyone. We raise our sons and they will leave us and become adults...
LAND OF DREAMS is the third book in a trilogy set written by the great writer, Irish writer, Kate Kerrigan. ELLIS ISLAND topped the NY Times Bestseller's list this year and it is well deserved by a tremendous writer that speaks candidly about the hopes, love and loss in all of her books that I have read.
The star character in this trilogy set is Ellie Hogan. She falls in love when she is young, marries the love of her life and so the story begins...
I love Ellie. I loved this book about Ellie as a mother with her two sons and her oldest running off to Hollywood to be an actor during the 1940's (Think the golden era period.)
~This story had much heartbreak to it, but real heartbreak that felt real and real to life, so when I read a story that rings so real, so true, well, if you love a character you will go through their suffering, too. Ellie experiences great joys in her time in Los Angeles, too. But I don't want to give it away. This book is too good. You must discover on your own.
First you must read ELLIS ISLAND, then CITY OF HOPE, followed by LAND OF DREAMS.
I had a deep fascination with old Hollywood when I first moved there. I would read everything about the studios, watched all of the old movies I could get my hands on...and reading LAND OF DREAMS captured that era, captured Los Angeles. The descriptions were so real and so vivid, I was right there with Ellie reaching out to touch the sun. I was with her at the Manzanar camp, I was with her when she ran down the Hollywood Hills to catch a cab after finding out the man she had been seeing was seeing somewhere else.
I must say at the end of the book, I began to worry about the conclusion. What would happen to Ellie? Gees, I wanted something grand to happen...AND IT DID.
When you open your heart, the world flies open and great things happen.
Here is a wonderful quote in the book:

"When you love something or someone, you want to hold onto them tight and never let them go, but life doesn't work like that. You had to take the things you loved and scatter them about you like petals, throw them to the wind as if they meant nothing to you. Then God might send you something else to love; someone new to care for. Then again, He might not. Life was, with or without God, a chancy business. The only hope was to let go. Of everything."

Kate Kerrigan is in my top five favorite contemporary female authors. I don't want to compare her to anyone else because she has a style of her own that always touches me deeply in my heart.

I would love to read about Ellie again!

Here are some of her books that I have read that you need to discover:

Miracles of Grace
Perfect Recipes for a Marriage
Ellis Island
City of Hope
Land of Dreams

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

I read this book not having read the first two books in this series. So I expected I might be a little bit lost in the beginning, and I was OK with that. However, that was definitely not the case, since the first 50(!) pages were pretty much a rehash of everything that took place in the previous books...to the point that it got tedious and I was ready for the story to start.

Ellie is a twice-widowed woman raising her two adopted boys while working as an artist in New York during the early 1940s. When her oldest son disappears from school, and it turns out he's fled to Hollywood to become an actor, Ellie follows him west, to bring him back. However, she ends up staying in Hollywood, bringing her family with her.

I found Ellie to be a pretty unlikeable woman. Harsh, unfriendly, cold, and always thinking she was better than everyone else. She treated Stan, her love interest in Hollywood, pretty horribly. I felt absolutely no connection to her and could really care less what happened to her.

This book was filled with constant descriptions of things that happened in the previous books. As if the author felt the reader couldn't possibly remember something that we had already been told 75 pages previously. How many times did we need to be told how Ellie came to adopt Tom? Or how Ellie was so wonderful because she founded a woman's homeless shelter in New York?

For a book that takes place during World War II, there was very little mention of the war! Except for a handful of pages where Ellie's new half-Japanese friend Suri talks about the horrors of the internment camps, and a bizarre side trip to Manzanar, all of which seemed incredibly contrived, as if the author felt she had to somehow shoehorn in something about the Japanese internment camps to prove her book was set during wartime.

Overall, I cannot recommend this book, and I don't think I'm going to go back and read the first two books in the trilogy. If you've already read the first two, you may want to give this a try, just to finish the arc. Otherwise, give this one a pass.

[Olivia D'silva · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have just finished a week of late nights digesting the final part of this trilogy - torn between wanting to savour the final part of Ellie's journey and being unable to put it down!

I couldn't imagine why or how Ellie was going to end up in Hollywood as it didn’t seem like her kind of place. Sure enough as the story unravels, it is not through decisions she is making for herself but for her love, devotion and loyalty to her family and desire to help her close friends and other people who happen to cross her path that take her there.

I have really enjoyed how seeing Ellie's character develop over the whole journey and through all her loves and losses. In Ellis Island I respected the young girl who sacrificed the high life through loyalty to her husband and her roots. In City of Hope and Land of Dreams, her character develops into someone who, at times, is intensely annoying - a hot head who is capable of making wild decisions and taking crazy actions. However, this is what makes her who she is - she is always driven by her desire to help the people close to her and she never loses her integrity. She always self-reflects and learns and ultimately grows into a mature character who is full of wisdom but very human and real - i.e. far from perfect! I was very pleased with how her journey ended up.

[Rosaleen Mccann · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had read the first two books of this Trilogy, (loved them) and therefore purchased the final installment with much anticipation. But it felt more like getting digestive when you wanted a jaffa cake. Its grand but not as good as could be.
I found Ellie had changed to a character I didn't recognise, living in an era, which was unfortunately depicted in such a fashion it reflected little of the 40's, in which the book is set. It just didn't have a day-gone-by feel about it. Just too modern to be kept in sync with the first two books.
Ellie became across slightly bitter and very retrospective. A quick synopsis of the previous books were repeated through the book, made it somewhat depressing. Without giving away to storyline, I just personally didn't like the direction the book took for Ellie. She was such an inspirational, level headed yet feisty character for the first two books, yet for this I found her wilting.
I gave this book a three, an average marking for an average read. It is grand for a quick- sun holiday read, mildly entertaining, but in hindsight, if I was reading for the first time, i would approach it with less expectations.

[Davney Stahley · Rating 2 out of 5]

50% of this book was a recap of the first and second in the trilogy. I found myself impatient and irritated at Ellie who became more vain, impetuous and foolish so that by this third book I wanted to throttle her. Ms. Kerrigan would have been smarter to write one long great book rather than one good book (Ellis Island), one okay book (city of Hope) and one boring, repetitive, book (Land of Dreams) in which the heroine does a lot of ruminating about motherhood, children, men, and "art". I wasted my time and finished it because I wanted to know what happened to Ellie. Predictable ending.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Ellie was even less likeable this time around...snotty, know-it-all, indecisive, obsessed with her children. It got to be very annoying how she thought she knew better in a situation than everyone else due to her "life experience" and how she pretty much uses men...she likes the idea of love, but in each of the books I've found her idea of love a bit warped and more leaning towards her being needy.

[Jacqui H. Travis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maybe because I've always had a fascination with the Golden Age of Hollywood in the 1940's, I enjoyed this third book of the Ellis Island series so much more than the first two books.
I thought Ellie's haste in rushing to Los Angeles to find her son Leo, and the ease with which she agreed to stay, then set up a household to be a little contrived, but a good story developed from there.

The story presents an interesting microcosm of Los Angeles in the 1940's and the early movie studio world, which unlike today, was at that time a sleepy, slow paced, dusty, semi-arid desert town, with none of the larger than life glitz, glamour and energy that it is today.

Ellie, as usual, assembles a varied, full household composed of family, friends, cast-offs, and homeless people that she once again turns into a family community.

Another dramatic side story involves her friendship with Suri, a Japanese-American writer, who has herself deliberately interred in Manzanar Japanese Internment Camp in southern California, in order to take care of her elderly relatives being held there. (This stark, solemn site is now a National Park Historic Site, near Yosemite and Death Valley National Parks.)

This was an enjoyable conclusion to Ellie Logan's 3-book saga, and made reading the first two books worth the effort.

[Nicole Avery · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost put down this book several times because I found the main character to be very bossy and entitled. But I stuck with it because I was interested in the fate of her sons and other peripheral characters. Ellie's relationship with Stan made it incredibly hard for me to feel any connection with her. This man tells her he loves her, she rejects a relationship with him, and then she has the nerve to complain that he is seeing anther woman?! Yet- she ends up with him at the end. No thank you!

[Theresa Petoskey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Compared to the others this one seemed to drag a bit I had to push myself to finish it and not just put it up but it ended providing a nice wrap up to the trilogy tying up the story line. With the back of the book talking about Hollywood during WWII I thought part of the story line would involve Leo being drafted when he turned 18 and it'd be a war story but that wasn't the case it focused less on the Hollywood glitz and more on Ellie's roll in her sons lives and that of her friends as her sons grow up and her own attitude and look at life grows and matures.

[Linda Smatzny · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book begins on Fire Island, New York in 1942 and ends in 1950 in Hollywood. Ellie is now the mother of two boys by adoption and is a painter. When her 16 year old son, Leo, runs away to Hollywood Ellie goes after him. Instead of returning to New York, she brings Tom, her other son, and Bridie out west. The book covers this last journey that Ellie undertakes in trying to find happiness and peace. The book was a quick easy read.

[Christine Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disappointing finale to the trilogy. Quite some time has passed from the end of book 2 to the start of book 3 and it takes a while to get back into the story as the focus has changed from altruism and community to Ellie becoming an artist on Fire Island and living a bohemian lifestyle with her adopted sons.
She then crosses the country in pursuit of her runaway son and although I read the story to the end I wasn’t as engaged as I had been in the earlier two novels.

[Sarah Hausken · Rating 2 out of 5]

So, I really enjoyed the first two books in this series. But I found this one a bit annoying. The main character came across as self centered when I didn't find her to be so in the previous books. I almost stopped reading it partway through, but my curiosity got the better of me and I finished it. The story was still good, but I was just sometimes bothered by the narrator's self centeredness.

[Cammy Kinstedt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting reading

I felt a little like the book jumped around a lot. It was hard in the beginning chapters to keep everyone straight. I noticed one mistake. She was called by her second husband's name through part of the book then switched to Mrs. H for Hogan her first husband's surname. The book was funny, sweet and sad.

[Torrie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like this last book in the series, but it was kind of hard to stay excited about it. I wanted to punch Ellie in the face sometimes, but I also felt sorry for her. the series wrapped up nicely which I always appreciate.

[Michelle Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very nice read. Transported back in time to Hollywood in the 40's. Lots of different elements to this story & not really a love story. I haven't read the previous 2 books in this series but I will keep an eye out for them.

[Donna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked Ellie less and less with each book. Her reinvention as an artist who ends up in Hollywood seemed out of character completely. I understood her to a large degree but baffled by her inability to truly bond with anyone in her life. She's a forgettable heroine for me.

[Sharon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This didn’t feel like the same series and in fact I might have enjoyed it if it was a stand alone book and made no reference to the previous books. I did enjoy the chapter involving the Japanese internment camp.

[Martha · Rating 3 out of 5]

The ongoing story of Ellie Hogan. This time to Hollywood. Not as compelling as the other two by Kerrigan, it is nevertheless a good read.

[Sandi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful book. 3rd of a trilogy - all of them really good!

[Judy Palmore · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ending

I've got to say I enjoyed the first and the second book more than this the third book.
This was more about her kids and her friends

[Eunice GM · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a slow plot for me but I love how the characters grew with each chapter.

[Glenda Dixon · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was not as repetitive as book 2 thank goodness. I enjoyed it, but not as much as book 1 in the series. Some lovely quotes on love and life that had me reflecting.

[Danni · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting