Very familiar plot tarted up with skin-tight tracksuits and backwards baseball caps. But the cheekiness and bitchy energy of...
Movie stars get mad—and get even.
Lola Sanchez is the hottest thing in Hollywood—and is insisting on action star Linc Blackwood for her next picture, secretly vowing revenge for his getting her pregnant on a boozy night ten years ago, when she was just plain Lucia Nobody. At 15, she was so innocent—and then he’d walked in to the party . . . “Linc Blackwood! Her favorite movie star! She’d seen all his movies three times. She could hardly believe it!” A subsequent back-alley abortion left her infertile and bitter. But her dopey tennis-god husband Matt Seel doesn’t seem to mind. Hey, Lola’s limo is so big he can practice his backhand in it, and he doesn’t appear to notice that Lola is screwing her former flame Tony Alvarez, a druggin’, thuggin’ lowlife who’s made it big as a director. Lissen up, chica, Lola rules: Forget Linc’s loyal wife, raven-haired, totally talented English actress Shelby Cheney—Lola gives blowjobs that make men loco. But Shelby loves Linc no matter what—and only she knows that he drinks and cheats on account of his abusive father beat his doormat mother to death, then blew his worthless brains out. Okay, then, moving along to Cat Harrison, the 19-year-old ultrahottie writer/director of a breathtakingly hip new movie, married to sensationally sexy, perpetually stoned Aussie rock star Jump. Cat is writing and directing Shelby’s next movie, when not dodging the amorous advances of Nick Logan, the handsome, horny male lead (she fends him off for about five minutes, a record for self-restraint in a Collins heroine). Eventually, Matt, who seems to have fuzzy green tennis balls for brains, figures out what’s going on—and the real shooting begins. Nice girls finish first.
Very familiar plot tarted up with skin-tight tracksuits and backwards baseball caps. But the cheekiness and bitchy energy of Collins’s previous trashy treats just ain’t here—as if written by someone else: uncharacteristically dull.Pub Date: Dec. 2, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-1649-0
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2003
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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