Fashionista Lola Santisi is hit with multiple personal and professional crises during a trip to the annual Cannes Film Festival.
Giving up her Los Angeles roots has proved difficult for Lola, the Hollywood princess first introduced in Celebutantes (2009). Now happily residing in New York, she gets to live and work with Julian, her Best Gay Forever (BGF,) as the busy CEO of Julian Tennant Inc., an up-and-coming fashion line. However, Lola’s doctor fiancée, Luke “Lev” Levin, is still back in L.A., making a bicoastal existence a necessity. And Lola’s famous family needs her attention as well. Her gruff director father Paulie is still making award-winning films, while her former-model mom has found a new calling as a cast member of a “Housewives” style reality show. Her aspiring director brother Christopher is in love with her best friend, Kate, an ambitious CAA agent, who has just dumped him so she could concentrate on her career. And as talented as he is, getting Julian’s name out there has proven challenging, making his deep-pocketed backers a bit skittish. But then Lola scores the major coup of having Julian’s dresses appear in Baz Luhrmann’s latest extravaganza, Four Weddings and a Bris. So they head to the French Riviera for the film’s Cannes premier, and a Julian Tennant runway show. The trip coincides with a high-profile magazine cover shoot with the film’s leading lady Saffron Sykes and her handsome boyfriend Markus Livingston. But the cover shoot looks increasingly dicey after Saffron and her starlet co-star (and Kate’s client) Cricket Curtis get caught in a Sapphic clinch. Then Lev shows up in France and admits, to Lola’s horror, that he wants to quit medicine to pursue acting. Throw in a supermodel with anger-management issues; an alcoholic movie star who insists on staying in character as a cross-dressing Columbian drug lord; and an icy magazine editor bent on destruction, and it is a miracle if Lola can walk away with her life, let alone her job. The increasingly absurd plot zips along, but the constant name- and brand-dropping often comes across as more obnoxious than amusing.
Forgettable showbiz spoof.
Pub Date: May 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-312-54442-3
Page Count: 304
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: April 4, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
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