Trashy and trite.
Kerlin and Oh treat readers to plenty of sex, drugs and stilettos in their splashy debut offering a peek into the lives of Heidi Klum wannabes.
Discovered by a photographer in her small Virginia hometown, Heather Johnston soon gets the call from a New York agency and leaves behind her simple middle-class family to join the high-flying elite. While trying to land a major modeling campaign and score some big bucks, she must pay her dues by living in “the model dorm,” a cramped apartment packed with fresh model meat. For the agency, it’s a way to keep costs low until the new girls land lucrative contracts. The whiny prima donnas consider bunk beds in a one-bedroom share subhuman treatment. Heather hooks up with her leggy roommates to escape the shabby apartment and hunt for free booze and wealthy men. But she isn’t like the others, the author assures us: Heather also likes art, and she toys with the idea of abandoning her model dreams to become an art-history student. This manufactured conflict doesn’t interfere much with the authors’ mission to reveal the trade’s Dark Secrets—all those models who claim to eat three square meals a day are lying through their whitened teeth!—nor does it spoil the juicy fun of watching the girls stab each other in the back to score hot European club promoters and choice modeling jobs. Former teen model Kerlin, now a college sophomore, makes a point (with former model-dorm roommate Oh) of showing that there’s work involved in becoming a successful model: Glory awaits those who trade dancing on the tables at Bungalow 8 for time on the treadmill. The authors’ prose matches their clichéd nostrums. If Kerlin did indeed write any of this, she might want to consider adding an expository writing course to her class schedule . . . and find a coauthor whose credentials go beyond “lifestyle marketing.”
Trashy and trite.Pub Date: Jan. 2, 2007
ISBN: 0-7432-9826-8
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Atria
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2006
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these...
Figuratively and literally shattering moments of hoRRRRRipilication in Chamberlain, Maine where stones fly from the sky rather than from the hands of the villagers (as they did in "The Lottery," although the latter are equal to other forms of persecution).
All beginning when Carrie White discovers a gift with telekinetic powers (later established as a genetic fact), after she menstruates in full ignorance of the process and thinks she is bleeding to death while the other monsters in the high school locker room bait and bully her mercilessly. Carrie is the only child of a fundamentalist freak mother who has brought her up with a concept of sin which no blood of the Lamb can wash clean. In addition to a sympathetic principal and gym teacher, there's one girl who wishes to atone and turns her date for the spring ball over to Carrie who for the first time is happy, beautiful and acknowledged as such. But there will be hell to pay for this success—not only her mother but two youngsters who douse her in buckets of fresh-killed pig blood so that Carrie once again uses her "wild talent," flexes her mind and a complete catastrophe (explosion and an uncontrolled fire) virtually destroys the town.
King handles his first novel with considerable accomplishment and very little hokum—it's only too easy to believe that these youngsters who once ate peanut butter now scrawl "Carrie White eats shit." But as they still say around here, "Sit a spell and collect yourself."Pub Date: April 8, 1974
ISBN: 0385086954
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Sept. 26, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 1974
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
© Copyright 2026 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
