Although the writing is competent, this novel illustrates the main difficulty posed by “reality-based” fiction: the inherent...
Reality queen Frankel expands her brand with a roman à clef.
Recent NYU graduate Faith Brightstone, determined to make it as an actress, leaves Manhattan for Los Angeles. Reluctantly welcomed by her distant father, she befriends his live-in girlfriend Brooke, who introduces Faith to the L.A. club scene. There follows an episodic, summary-heavy narration of Faith’s encounters with men, old and young, most of whom do nothing to advance her career or enliven her love life. The exception is Vince Beck, a sexy producer with an Aussie accent, but, unsurprisingly, he turns out to be married. After two stints as personal assistant to the petty tyrants that are so much a staple of Hollywood literature (in a perhaps subliminal nod to Sunset Boulevard, one of Faith’s jobs ends when a scriptwriter is found dead in her employer’s pool), Faith cannot get a part—her weight, normal everywhere else, is chubbette-grade in California. Embarking, with her cheerfully bulimic roommate, on a starvation diet, she gets skinny then finally gets cast—in a soft porn flick. So much for Hollywood dreams. Part two finds Faith back in Manhattan five years later. She’s turned her obsession with weight into a promising small business. Her over-the-top repartee and entrepreneurial chops garner the attention of the producers of Domestic Goddess, a cable reality TV show hosted by Sybil Matthews, a fictional avatar of Martha Stewart, only more diabolical. The remainder of the book chronicles the usual reality show indignities as contestants are ritually humiliated and eliminated, challenge by challenge. Sybil already has Faith in her sights, since Faith has some dirt on a fellow contestant and a history with the show’s executive producer. What will the home and garden diva do when she finds out her own son is Faith’s latest club conquest?
Although the writing is competent, this novel illustrates the main difficulty posed by “reality-based” fiction: the inherent tedium of unedited real life, however glitzy the surroundings.Pub Date: May 1, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-4516-6737-0
Page Count: 368
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: April 8, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2012
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
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