Fast-moving fluff, with hours of fun for anyone determined to figure out who the bad guys really are.
Zippy tell-all follows the misadventures of Corki Brown, professional coddler to the stars.
Corki Brown has spent almost 20 years taking care of Hollywood celebrities—cooking their meals, picking up their dry cleaning, and using her garage to store their incriminating goods (gifts from an ex-boyfriend, unlicensed guns, etc.). She's thoroughly disenchanted with her career, but as a single mom with a ten-year-old son to support, she can't quit now. Our story opens on an annual ritual: purchasing memorable gifts for Steven Spielberg on behalf of her clients on the occasion of his birthday. She's also planning to cater a dinner for Academy Award–winner Lucy Bennett, and drop off the laundry of the latest conquest of aging star Jock Straupman. The author's strongest suit is in presenting these hectic, absurd mundanities of assistant work; she herself spent 20 years doing tasks that ostensibly resemble the ones her heroine faces, and her accounts of highway shortcuts and the bakshish system ring true. But for those hoping to get in on real-life, titillating scuttlebutt, the rest of her work is more obscure; although she's presumably dishing dirt on various baddies, it isn't clear exactly who’s who. Howard’s celebrity protagonists—Lucy, Jock, and others—seem to be composites; understandably, as presumably few Hollywood star would tolerate being presented as maintaining an underground arsenal or recruiting underage sex partners. (Jennifer Aniston, however, is mentioned by name as the rare celeb who treats her employees humanely.) The story gets wilder by the minute, as Corki's clients charge her with planning a last-minute wedding in Greece, and exchanging $100,000 for damning home videos; the whole is then wrapped up in an improbably neat twist, but the plot is hardly the point here.
Fast-moving fluff, with hours of fun for anyone determined to figure out who the bad guys really are.Pub Date: April 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-06-072391-2
Page Count: 288
Publisher: HarperEntertainment
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2005
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
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
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