Kick by Paula Byrne review – too much dazzle

This ‘true story’ of the life of Kathleen Kennedy, JFK’s sister, is dangerously close to hagiography

From “Jack” to “Kick”, the Kennedy self-confidence expressed in demotic monosyllables does not cease to dazzle. Fifty-three years after JFK’s assassination, and 68 years after his beloved sister’s death in an air crash, biographers continue to fly into the lost world of Kennedy brilliance, as moths to a flame. In the inevitable burn-up that follows, language itself acquires ever more lurid tones.

So Kick is not the biography of Joe Kennedy’s second daughter Kathleen. Rather, it is “the true story of Kick Kennedy, JFK’s forgotten sister and the heir to Chatsworth”. But if Kick is a “true story”, we should also recognise what it’s not. It is, for instance, scarcely a dispassionate biography. Paula Byrne, the author of Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead (2009), the book that gave her the idea for Kick, is too heavily invested in her subject for the usual considerations of objectivity. Thus: “Kick was approaching her 16th birthday, and she wanted some fun.” No surprise, also, to find it falling for the temptations of sentiment: “Kick felt as if she was in another world as she gazed at the rows of snow-capped pines and the enormous fairytale hotel nestling under the Swiss Alps, which loomed over the tiny village of Gstaad.”

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