Alterations

by Kate Maruyama

Praise for Alterations:

“Kate Maruyama invents a magical refracted Hollywood history and a lusty, coded story of forbidden love in Lotusland.” --Matt Tyrnauer, director of Victoria's Secret: Angels & Demons and Scotty and the Secret History of Hollywood
"A gorgeous, exquisitely plotted, humane, warm, real, and unpredictable book." --J Ryan Stradal, Kitchens of the Great Midwest, The Lager Queen of Minnesota

"Alterations is flat-out wonderful. A warm, sensitive and beautifully-written novel about complicated families, thwarted love, and the heartbreaking difference between old movies and real life." -- Peter Blauner NY Times bestselling author of THE INTRUDER and PICTURE IN THE SAND

In this stunning literary novel, Alterations, Kate Maruyama has stitched together a multi-generational tapestry of women with entwined journeys of big love, profound loss, and the wonder and allure of cinema. As this superbly-designed story unfolds through time, locations, and from regrets to hope, it wraps around the reader’s heart. This is a deeply moving, dazzling, and delightful read.
--Toni Ann Johnson, author of Light Skin Gone to Waste winner of the Flannery O’Connor award, Remedy for a Broken Angel, and two time NAACP Image Award nominee

Jacket copy:
Adriana, a seamstress for Edith Head at Paramount’s costume department in the 1940s, falls in love with a bit player named Rose and the two move in together. As Adriana’s career blossoms, society and life interfere and Adriana makes decisions that affect three generations of her family.

1998: Laura, Adriana’s granddaughter has left LA on the heels of a failed relationship and a career in film. She moves in with her grandmother in Baltimore to find some time and space to think, but her beloved cousin dies leaving her daughter, Lizzie, who also moves in with them.

You can’t choose your family, but you can’t escape them either. Three lives twine together in the past and the present to take a closer look at how family, tight or not, makes up who we are.

Genres: Historical Fiction

412 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 11, 2025

About the author

Kate Maruyama writes, teaches, cooks, and eats in Los Angeles, where she lives with her family.

She is the author of The Collective (Writ Large Press), Bleak Houses (Raw Dog Screaming Press) and her novella Family Solstice which is in that book was named Best Fiction Book of the 2021 by Rue Morgue Magazine. Her historical novel Alterations is upcoming from Running Wild Press in March of 2023

Her short work has been published in Asimov's Magazine, Analog Science Fiction & Fact, The Coachella Review, and on Entropy, Gemini Magazine, Salon, The Rumpus and Duende, among others.

She is a member of the SFWA and HWA where she serves on the Diverse Works Inclusion Committee. She has served as a jury chair for The Bram Stoker Awards and twice as a juror for the Shirley Jackson Awards.

You can keep up with Kate's news with her newsletter, Read. Write. Cook. which you can sign up for on her website!

Reviews

[Talya Jankovits · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alterations is a beautiful weaving of multi-generational stories of women overcoming loss in various forms. Told from three points of view and spanning three generations, Maruyama seamlessly moves through time and space. She transports you to old-school Hollywood, adding a glamorous flair to her storytelling, where movie sets and a cottage in Melrose California elicit nostalgia. She just as keenly captures the energy of Baltimore in the late 90's, its oppressive summer heat, its brown and chilled autumn. Place and time are as rich as her characters - none of whom are without some kind of loss, some kind of flaw, all who feel real or familiar in some way. Through two women and a young girl, whose lives reconnect in unexpected ways, Maruyama expertly captures the complications of love and family, of the young and the old. This is a beautiful book that reminds us that life is often too short or moves too quickly and the best kind of living is the most authentic kind.

[Lisa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Much like an old Hollywood film, Alterations transports us through time to the glamour and tragedy of Hollywood. Through Adriana and her family — those she lost, and those she hurt- we learn over and over the cost of not following our dreams in a world that is not hospitable to dreams and love that do not fit the molds society has chosen to approve. Still through friends and community we, along with the cast of Alterations, find our way. Maruyama is a masterful storyteller and creator of characters we miss whe the story ends.

[Suzanne Uttaro · Rating 5 out of 5]

Set in the glitz and glamour of 1940s Hollywood and the grit and grind of 1990s Baltimore, Alterations is a story of loss and surrender—and the difficult choices that ripple through generations.

Adriana arrives in Hollywood in the late 1930s chasing a film career. Instead, she finds work as a seamstress to the stars and falls in love with a larger-than-life actress named Rose. At the height of her success, Adriana is forced into what historian Vito Russo called the Celluloid Closet. She gives up Rose. In time, she marries a man she doesn’t love and has two daughters she feels estranged from and cannot love.

That emotional legacy lives on in her granddaughter Laura, a failed filmmaker, and great-granddaughter Lizzie, recently orphaned at thirteen. Each struggles with the patterns of secrecy, sorrow, and emotional distance that have shaped their lives.

Kate Maruyama offers a glimpse into the dazzling beauty and quiet brutality of Golden Age Hollywood. Through Adriana’s eyes, we witness the insidious culture of censorship and homophobia—and the complicity and stereotyping that persisted well into the 1990s.


At the beginning of the story, Lizzie recalls: “My Nonna always said that life isn’t so much a tapestry as a patchwork. You sew and you sew and stitch the pieces together as best you can… when you stand back and make some alterations here and there, and get it just so, that patchwork is something to behold…”

This is the tapestry of our lives: imperfect, stitched from joy and sorrow, shaped by choices we never meant to make. Maruyama reminds us that while life may not unfold as we imagined, there is still beauty in what we create from its pieces.

[Miranda Summerset · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5/5 STARS! Ugh, why cant we give half stars yet????? Okay, I have thoughts. First off, books like this are my guilty pleasures. I love a good generational tale of women in a family all discovering themselves. My problem with this though, I kind of hated Laura & Adriana. I did appreciate both at the end (great character growth!), but they drove me nuts the whole book. I did love Lizzie so much, & was truly heartbroken for her. This has a fantastic plot & premise, I just wished I cared more for the 2 main characters. Even their love stories kind of didn't hit the marks for me. All in all, I loved the classic Hollywood mentions (Barbara Stanwyck is a queen), & really liked this....i just didn't love it as much as I should have. Still recommend though!